Text imprint Matanzas Cuba, Edicion Matanzas, ©2015
PREFACE IN THE middle of the year 2008 I undertook to design the research that underlies the literary framework of Elogio de la altea o las paradojas de la racionalidad, a book published years later and which since then has furnished me with much happiness. I had returned from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, still impressed by the subtle yet unequivocal displays of rejection with which my presence was greeted by the majority of the middle class neighborhood where I had to live for a year and a half. That narcissism surprised me which erects altars to straightened hair in a society that considers itself as a "coffee with cream" nation, with the early morning industry of haircutters and stylists, in solicitous wait behind their chairs during the first hours of the morning. Such virtuous punctuality did not help me much since, having spent my first month of residency in the land of Bolívar, I had to traverse six beauty salons in the center of Caracas to find a specialist disposed to deal with my "crudo" hair. My haircutter passed for white--as they were accustomed to say in that part of the world--and was a productive and friendly person; so much so that once her contract in the beauty salon was closed, I followed her to her neighborhood, in the proletarianized western zone of the city. The commercial publicity of beauty products; the snowy appearance of the actors and hosts on cable television; the taxonomic jargon that is applied to persons according to the tone of their skin and the layout of their features; the perverse amiability of some bourgeois ladies who declined to board elevators in my presence; and the vigilant attitude that in elegant commercial establishments we clients of dark complexion provoked, persuaded me that racism can reproduce itself with total normalcy in a society chiselled with the physiognomic imprint of Indo-americans and Africans where white persons constitute an appreciable minority. Various times during the stay in Venezuela, I was surprised to mentally revert to events in my life in which my color held some importance, and compare the social and individual responses that I observed with others obtained from my remembrances. It had more questions than answers, such that I energetically plunged into the social history of our nations, in hopes that these readings might help me to pose the questions in an adequate manner. When in a careful manner I broached the subject with Venezuelan friends and girlfriends, it did not surprise me very much to observe that their experiences, doubts and discomforts over the racial question were similar to my own. I then launched a discreet survey among Cubans who, like myself, collaborate with the people and the government of that nation in spheres as important as health, sports, education, and culture. In Elogio a la altea, my first attempt to apprehend--within the culture that we inherit and construct every day--the causes of the permanence and the mutations of the prejudices and discriminatory practices in our nation, some anecdotes and interesting observations are inserted, where I intentionally selected among blacks and "mestizos," direct descendents of workers, peasants and housewives. They encouraged me to continue the interviews after my return to Cuba. By then, our excess of confidence in the infallibility of tranformations of a structural character had attenuated, and we began to abdicate from the positivist enthusiasm that had led us to underestimate the counterweight which inherited ways of life and culture exercise upon the social project in construction. The hardest years of the economic crisis, after the implosion of European socialism, left it clear that it is not possible to transform peoples' forms of thinking and acting without appealing, in addition to concepts and philosophic and political categories, to memory, to social representations, to feelings, and to emotions. This is so because ideological constructions--racism and anti-racism among them--are not articulated only with theoretic knowledge, but instead incorporate a part of the web of intersubjectivities from which every individual nurtures her own subjectivity. In search of an example that illustrates the complexity of the struggle against racism in our time, particularly in the conditions of Cuba--and when I say conditions I do not allude solely to the present, but also to the past and to the future--I am accustomed to compare its highest attainment, which is total de-racialization of social relations, with the liberation of a blockaded city that the invader guards with three defensive rings. The first ring, that which protects the access to the city, can be identified with the nature of a society--the structure of property, the legal framework, its institutional order, the character of the social relations--and like all systems of external defense, is very sensitive to the precision of the artillery and the overwhelming impact of the armored vehicles. In Cuba, this first ring was destroyed with the triumph of the Rebel Army and the dismantling of bourgeois institutions during the first three years of revolutionary power. Like the walls that protect military fortresses and the gates which privatize beaches, legalized and institutionalized racism was demolished; black and mixed-race persons attained dignity and no one could take it away again, with impunity, "at the door of a dancehall or a bar, or perhaps the carpet of a hotel." The change that the revolution inaugurated for the humble and exploited majority, generated an expansion of the feeling of social equality, a state of things and a way of doing things which diffused confidence that racism had been eradicated. On the 4th of February in 1962, before a million citizens gathered in the Civic Plaza to repudiate the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States (OAS) Fidel Castro highlighted among the achievements of the young revolution having "converted more than 100,000 small farmers into land owners, assured year-round employment in farms and cooperatives for all agricultural workers, transformed barracks into schools, awarded 70,000 scholarships to university, seconadary and technological students, created classrooms for the entire child population, completely liquidated illiteracy, quadrupled medical services, nationalized the monopolistic enterprises, suppressed the abusive system that converted housing into a means for exploitation of the people, virtually eliminated unemployment, and suppressed discrimination by reason of race or sex." Each one of the achievements mentioned by the leader of the Revolution was ratified by the multitude with a salvo of applause. Back then there was no political voluntarism nor any imposition, but instead a shared vision that the Cubans of all colors gathered in the Civic Plaza represented the spirit of a nation determined to unseat, at last, servitudes and divisions. Some researchers, trying to explain the unfolding of the anti-racist struggle in Cuba at the beginning of the Sixties, used that speech as a supreme example of paralyzing power. Yet that day Fidel Castro did not decree anything; he performed an inventory of the achievements of the nascent revolution, re- affirmed the horizons of the social model under construction and endorsed the thought that utopia was possible. And he did it with the rotund and metaphorical language of politics, with inflamed oratory of the Mountain that so well suited the irreverent youth of the revolution. In Cuba we did not extirpate "machismo" and the inferiorization of the woman in 1962, yet no one alludes to the 2d Declaration of Havana to argue the permanence of male dominance in our country, and even its incipient restoration in suddenly enriched families where the man imposes his condition as monopolistic provider, in women with professional qualifications who return permanently to the apron, or in the recrudescence of violence focused against women. Thus I think that one cannot attribute to one speech, be it one pronounced by the maximum leader, the capacity to inhibit or shut down a debate. Indeed I have come to think that, since then, interpretations opposite to that emancipatory discourse converged over time, paradoxically with similar results. Enthusiastic readers and the somewhat simple masses and a good part of the intellectuals discourage debate, by legitimating--with their praise or their silence--the end of racial discrimination in Cuba. The devious, conservative or self-interested reader profited from this circumstance, or those who, while militant in the revolution, did not believe it necessary to carry through to the end; those convinced that socialism can be constructed without demolishing the ideo-symbolic network erected in the 19th century to suppress the utopia of equality. Leveraged by dogmatism--with its tendency to confuse political equality with social equality--and by an obsessive search for unity before the enormous challenge of guaranteeing the survival of the revolutionary project; the mirage of racial equality became a barrier, when its questioning was considered a threat to "the unity of the nation." Throughout almost 200 years we Cubans have not managed to exorcise the ghost of disunity. It is present in the correspondence of the exiled Félix Varela, in the struggles between the civilian and military governments of independentist tendencies, in the unitary sermons of José Martí, in the peremptory military dispatches of Antonio Maceo, in the resigned alienation of Máximo Gómez, in the polemical approval of the Morúa Amendment, in the failure of the Veterans and Patriots Movement, in the frustrated Revolution of the 30's, and in the complex construction of consensus on the part of the revolutionary forces, which Fidel Castro implemented between 1959 and 1965. The permanent threat of an imperial power 90 miles off the Cuban coast augmented the value of unity and reinforced its imminence in the national political imagination. From the end of the 18th century to our own days, the application of a philosophy of equality to political projects characterized by the diversity of their protagonists has been a source of anxiety for leaders and visionaries. Despite their physical and temporal distance, I discover communicating levels between the mother of revolutions, that which transformed the world of politics and the politicians beginning in 1789, and the Cuban process, when I read a recent passage from the Gallic intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon: ...the State aimed to transform the nature of the social bond. It took as its mission to set up a new type of equivalence in the relations that individuals maintain among themselves. In an explicit form it sought to model a nation of equals leading to a permanent rescue of diversity in appearance. Thus it attempted to act upon all which actually governed the social bond--the organization of space, the language, the measure of things, memory itself--to instill a sense of equal belonging... The evocation of a family bond between the citizens in effect invites them to a sort of re-education of their regard. It proposes to correct through the heat of feelings and the forms of affect, the functional distances of life. What is certain is that in Cuba, before the appeal to unity, the battle was postponed and two of the pillars of racism remained nearly intact. In Encomium from Altea... I proposed to traverse the bastions which shape the second ring, whose function is to protect the vital points of the hypothetical city from subsistence for the invader. I tried to explain and explain to myself what our racism owes to the culture: those who came to us as masters and slaves; laborers and artisans; the tame and the wild; guerrillas and liberators; musicians and painters; nannies and coachmen; journalists, writers and scientists; men and women; whites, blacks and persons without definite color; masonic lodges and religious families; cabals of nations and mutual aid societies; syndicalists, teachers and feminist leaders; atheists and believers; workers and peasants; annexationists and patriots. Confronted with a second ring that has been reinforced with our prejudices and fears, we are today a still dispersed army whose Supreme Leader discusses alternatives for the re-conquest of the city. I dream of contributing to the shape of a plan of attack, and say more: I dream of joining the vanguard of that army, not only from my condition as a black woman, also because I am Cuban and a mother. I understand, however, that everything will not end there. When the second ring fails, although we shall have to confront an irregular defense, with crude barricades, camouflaged snipers and ambushes that will complicate movement through alleys and corridors. To liberate this beloved and mythical city from the handcuffs of racism, one will have to fight house to house and involve oneself in hand to hand combat. Discourses--thelogical, scientific, artistic--intended to rationalize racial hierarchy in the human species, were erected upon something non-existent and, like the mythical animals of our infancy, generated a narrative corpus where reality and fantasy are confounded. The racialization of humanity established truths which were made credible through scams, tricks and silences. It follows that Shackles of the memory might be a disturbing book, much like telling stories of apparitions on a dark and stormy night. We already know that "...it is not 'race' that constitutes a biological or psychological memory in persons, but racism which represents one of the most insistent forms of historical memory in modern societies. Racism is what continues to cause the imaginary 'fusion' of the past with the actuality in which the collective perception of human history unfolds." That stereotyped perception constructs hallucinatory theories, excused and justified with great versatility and resistance. When it is rejected by reason or by feelings, racism exists within instinct and emotion. Negated by ideological lineages, ethical discourses and edifying precepts, the ductile notion of race flowers in everyday phrases and behaviors, and in spiritual states as evanescent as apprehension and restlessness. For race--Fernando Ortiz asserted--"...is a phantom, precisely by being created by fantasy; yet the terror and the ease with which racism is expressed are not imaginative but real." In our countries--those that were invaded, decimated, enslaved, and classified by virtue of totally accidental attributes--to be considered white or black has practical consequences that impact various spheres of persons' social activity, above all those where advances and ascent depend upon the qualities that others attribute to you. Since the color of the skin has social meaning, to the myriad tones that our spectrum displays are applied classificatory criteria and hierarchies are recognized, validated in social relations which associate specific qualities not only to colors, but to tonalities of the skin. That process occurs in our mind, and not being subjective ceases to be part of everyday reality, for it concerns the way you look and how others perceive you, and the expectations that your appearance generates. Nobody is born white, black or mixed-race; they simply learn to be so, no matter which color their epidermis exhibits. Fruits of this apprenticeship are the rejection until well into the 20th century by the Caribbean middle class of lively colors in clothing; the popularity attained among female blacks of techniques of braiding hair with increasing levels of sophistication; the reluctance of United States blacks to eat watermelon in public; or the discomfort with which many descendents of Africans still greet the word negro if used to allude to someone, no matter the tone with which this word is said. "The economic and socio-cultural reality of racism in Latin America--the sociologist and Dutch linguist Teun A. Van Dijk tells us--is based on forms of discrimination such as subordination, marginalization or exclusion, which derive from an unequal distribution as much of the resources of material power as of symbolic power. Thus, in general, persons of African or indigenous appearance have limited access to capital, to land, to work, to housing, to education, to information, to status, to fame, to respect, et cetera." Racial subordination is the result of a long and consolidated process of domination, that constructed mechanisms of reproduction not only in the economic or political domain, but also at the level of subjectivity, establishing nexus characterized by their interdependence. Social relations legitimate, at every historical moment, the social representations--what qualities define me and which characterize the others--and both underly the processes of construction of social identities - who I am and who the others are. In turn, the identities constantly nourish the representations--of myself and of the others--shaping how we relate. Cuba comprises, undoubtedly, historical exceptionalism, by virtue of events and processes in which social thought, pedagogical ideology, cultural projects and institutions, journalism, the student movements, or the artistic and literary currents have been promoters of social change. The strong inter- relation between culture and politics is based upon their particularities and its notable influence is very often disproportionate in relation to their geography and the size of their population. Yet at the same time, due to its location, its history and its varied interactions with the neighboring territories, our nation forms part of a cultural region that shares social forms, symbols of identity, religions, folklore, music, dance, crafts, and an entire universe of cultural practices; approaches and symmetries much related to the forced African diaspora and its contributions to the shaping of the american nations. Due to its history, Cuba is a very important part of Afro-america. With its analysis of the current Cuban reality and its historical similarities to countries that suffered the scourge of slavery, Shackles of the memory tries to demonstrate that race is "the mark on the body of the position which was occupied in history," and that the position as well as its mark have consequences for contemporary societies. Relations of domination, always preponderant in the material universe, are only completed if they manage to extend to subjectivity and implant themselves in the imagination of dominators and dominated, causing them to share a single contradictory mode of apprehending reality, through social representations charged with stereotypes. By studying the psychological component of the social relations influenced by the color of the skin--a relational system that I have called raciality--this book attempts to draw attention to the intimate combat that we should wage against ourselves to get rid, once and for all, of psychological predispositions and instinctive behaviors. So that we do not accept ourselves as we are, nor justify our shameful acts and feelings, those which we suppress so as to pretend they never existed. Yet here raciality is the road, not the theme. Our colonial past constructed tethers that transcend the epidermis and reinforce, on an ideal plane, the subordinate position, extending in some measure the system of social hierarchy that colonial exploitation enabled. If the body remains free but the mind continues chained to the past, or to the adaptive reproduction of the subordination relations that that past engendered, our modes of thinking and behaving shall perpetuate the established patterns by those who once dominated us, creating conditions for them to continue to do so, now from the prison of our mind. We are not responsible for being the fruit of a slave society that ended by enslaving itself, and more than two centuries later her emancipation is not complete. It will be so if we do not interrogate history--our history--and, as Aimé Cèsaire wrote, we possess our past in order to convert it into a point of support and keep going forward. In the Corner of Texas, Hills District April 2015 A GLANCE AT THE RACES Slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudices. W. E. B. Dubois THE FIRST image I hold of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Father of the Cuban Nation, dates from a morning commemoration of the beginning of our wars of independence, in the small patio of a mansion converted into a school. The ten year-old boy who played him nervously touched his uncomfortable goatee and with his right hand reviewed the ragged heads of four classmates, all blacks, who brandishing their wooden machetes declared themselved disposed to die for Cuba's freedom. I would have been about six, and probably learned to read, like everyone, between lisps and gagging, deceived by the prospect of soon leaving behind the scholarly scenarios and reluctant lectures from my elders. The emotional memory of that morning in October accompanied me for a long time, re-affirmed until the end of secondary education by the epic re-enactments of my History teachers. The idyllic vision was maintained until, some years and readings later, I returned to the incongruity between Céspedes' gestures of liberty, his respectful attitude towards a shameful institution a few days later, and his timid decree abolishing slavery, in December of 1870. The Revolution of 1868 upset the social order with its eruptive force, yet its radicalness was insufficient to break the lenses of color in the view of the other. The racialization of the social relations within the Liberating Army can be appreciated in the denominations that the military dispatches and other official documents applied to the darkest--blacks, negroids-- above all if they were not soldiers; in their preferential exploitation as a workforce for agricultural chores or personal and quartermaster services; in the application of corporal punishment, including shackles, to restrain misbehavior; in the cultural requirements of the revolution's civil government in the awarding of military ranks, who regarded them as unlettered illiterates; and in the validity, until the end of 1870, of a Regulation for Freedmen which preserved various links in the chain of subordinations installed by colonialism. A dull and complacent reading of the Céspedes' emancipatory act does not help one understand the lack of belligerence and even the apparent betrayal of hundreds of the enslaved who, incorporated by their owners or their superiors into the Liberating Army, ended by facing the enemy forces, or serving in them. The historian José Abreu Cardet maintains the thesis that the involuntary soldiers "were worse treated by the insurrectionists than by their owners," referring to hunger, the hard living conditions, the exhausting work, and the mortal risks which the incorporation into the "mambisa" troops posed to many enslaved: ...they were subjected to the many dangers of a war. They could be wounded or killed in combat. Nor did they understand what was happening. In essence, for a portion of these slaves there was no substantial difference between the Spaniards and the Cubans. All the chiefs were white, a synonym for owners. In a certain sense, the act of these slaves in denouncing their owners, in joining the Spanish, in fleeing from the rebel camps, was a sort of rebellion against a situation that they did not understand, and which worsened their condition of slavery. Jorge Ibarra Cuesta had arrived at similar conclusions four decades prior to consideration, in military documents, personal correspondence and was diaries of various officials of the Liberating Army, a certain disconnection between the anti-slavery will proclaimed and the anti-racist ideal that should have underlied it. Ideología mambisa put in relief the Manichean approach to the "fundamental contradiction" of the age (national independence or social integration); developed the ideological dimension of class struggle in colonial Cuban society; grounded, with a Marxist focus, the role of intersubjectivity in social processes; and offered a much richer perspective on the representation of popular levels held by the groups--white, liberal and educated--who led the Ten Years' War. Of the belief in the superiority of the documented white culture upon the popular culture, incarnated by the Africans and their descendents, and the idea that they should be "prepared" before their entrance to civilization, various texts and independentist decrees give proof. In January of 1869, in a document directed to Cuban agents in the United States, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes stated that the end of slavery still could not be assumed as a fact "...because I have wanted to prepare so that the new citizens might enter in full possession of their rights, and do so at least somewhat instructed in what they should understand by true liberty." A little later, in the circular sent on the 25th of December in 1870 to make official the end of forced service by the slaves incorporated in the Mambisa army, Céspedes noted: "Two years watching the spectacle of our liberties is sufficient to consider them now regenerated and grant them full independence, when to subjection to our laws they will have an indisputable right." With time I understood that the Revolution of '68, like any process of rupture with the past, assumed different degrees of radicalness; and that the economic circumstances, by their incidence upon the social fabric, can be the wave that rolls or the dam which detains. Only when the plantation system, based on large estates and an enslaved workforce, became unviable through its poor performance, facing layers of technological innovation, high costs of production and even higher social and political costs; the Cuban patriciate, though fearful of the emancipatory spirit of Haiti, submitted to the evidence for the inevitable end of slavery. The catastrophic preventatives of the Cuban landlords always contended with the ideal of national independence and social fraternity in the 19th century, by virtue of the Eurocentric and racist cultural tradition in which the Creole elites had been educated. A double paradox was thus generated: on one side, that of the republican ideal which gained ground in the cities, turning against the colonial status of the overseas possessions. On the other, that of Cuban liberalism, which in a fluffy bed dreamt of country and liberty while tens of thousands of Africans and enslaved creoles lived badly in the ghettos of the gigantic plantation into which the Island was converted. Treated like objects that could be "...permuted, rented, sold, retried, raffled, redeemed, willed for testamentary disposition, used for payment of debts, and for the entertainment of their owners"; the revolution in Haiti showed another path to the enslaved of Cuba to claim their humanity and even their deserving of the condition of citizens. To that was opposed an elite that, bent on preserving their parasitical lifestyle, intensified the exploitation of the workforce to levels irreconcilable with the economic caution advised for ending that treatment and the incessant rise of the slave market. None of the civic projects elaborated by the Cuban intellectual vanguard during the first half of the 19th century proposed the abolition of slavery; much less did they attempt to confront the colonial regime with a specific proposal. Félix Varela alone envisioned--when England and France had not eradicated the slave-owning regime in their colonies--a "Decree Project concerning the abolition of slavery in the Island of Cuba and of the means for avoiding the damages this might occasion for the white population and to agriculture," with the purpose of submitting it to the Courts of Cádiz in 1822-1823; an intention frustrated by the dissolution of the forum and the fall of the constitutional regime under pressure from the French army, whose invasion made possible the monarchical restoration and the revocation by Ferdinand VII of the 1812 Constitution. Years later, the constituent Courts installed in Spain by the liberal revolution of 1868 promulgated the Moret Law or "freedom of wombs," a useless and pernicious postponement of the abolition which, extending until 1880 the so-called Patronage Law, would exhaust its capacity for contention in 1886. The Creole landlords managed to inhibit the public debate over slavery for almost half a century. Their anti-abolitionist propaganda--favored by the colonial authorities, and seconded by important Havana newspapers--barely had a counter-weight, and the conservative forces on the peninsula underwrote it to impede the acceptance of an abolitionist Society in Cuba. They counted on the complicity of the functionaries of the Crown to abort the legal initiatives of the anti-slavery court, or to temper their interests. They incentivized information flows and matrices of opinion intended to terrorize the metropolitan elites with the probable extension to Cuba of the Haitian rebellion, while with the civil and military bureaucracy they forged an alliance based upon traffic in influence and the negotiation of quotas of participation in the contraband of blacks. The generalized corruption that enthroned slavery and its metastasis in the social body were denounced by the Englishman Richard Madden, superintendent of freedmen, for whom Cuba was a society: ...where the capitalists who have acquired their riches through the abominable traffic in Negroes, enjoy, thanks to their sovereignty, the "Excellency" treatment; where the prosperous trader in human flesh, retired now from the traffic, is national nobility; where the foreigner who still practices this lucrative branch of commerce along the coast is the jovial companion of the commercial magnates of the region; and where even the agents of foreign governments are greeted as the private protectors of the traffic in blacks, whose progress we know they desire. Thousands of persons were hidden in the slave censuses in order to avoid taxes. and many other freedmen were used as replacements for slaves who had died, even before the authorities in charge would decide their destinies. Pressured by the critiques of England and the United States, whose governments were negotiating an agreement to impede the traffic of Africans towards America, the metropolitan authorities promulgated in September of 1866 a royal decree --elevated to the rank of law in May of 1867 and placed into effect through regulation 13 months afterwards--which ordered the performance of a general census of all the enslaved and declared free all persons who were not recorded, as well as those who, in advance, were born to them. According to the Spanish historian José Antonio Piqueras Arenas: The census would be verified on this occasion through visual inspection by the functionaries, trying to appear in the greatest number of settlements and farms simultaneously, to avoid hiding. The census would be performed by districts, and a register would be opened for each slave where a registry number would be assigned, with the exact parentage and a brief summary of the contracts that might modify their ownership and civil status. The decree imposed severe penalties for hiding slaves, falsifications of the census and irregularities committed by the functionaries in the execution of this task. For the first time the law also contemplated the possibility that the authorities might implement searches inside of the farms in pursuit of the traffic of Africans. Despite that, the slavers persisted in their fraudulent strategies, for another recount, held in 1871, recorded 75,668 fewer captives, against the grain of the significant reduction in restrictive processes that was experienced after 1860 and the diminishment of mortality in the establishments, tendencies influenced by the high prices in the market for slaves. When the new statistics were published, the Moret Law had even fewer results to display, due to the constant demands and solicitations for postponement of compliance from the ranchers, who also pressured to retard until the end of 1872 the publication of the regulation which implemented it, their greedy approach caused by the high prices that sugar attained from then on. The Seventies of the 19th century, though illuminated by the example of thousands of Africans and descendents incorporated into the Liberating Army, did not honor the radical anti-slavery of the Guáimaro Constitution, given that "...the majority of Cuban slaves remained unequivocally enslaved..., the owners keeping the children of slaves working without pay on the plantations, and tried to deny non-registered slaves access to the lists that would allow them to verify their situation, disputing the ages of the old, and lobbied in favor even to limit the concessions traditionally granted to those in bondage." Particularly the freedmen, who legally were not slaves yet nor were they free, since being people originating from Africa they were considered non- persons destined to a servile condition, were the object of innumerable abuses and vile domestic traffic. Their "apprenticeship" periods could be renewed indefinitely to support businesses in which participated, with great economic benefit, ranchers, merchants, negotiators, and colonial functionaries, above all beginning with the governorship of Miguel Tacón. Under Leopoldo O'Donell, one of his followers in the general corruption of the captaincy, more than 1,100 freedmen "disappeared" during the four and a half years of his command. In May of 1880 almost a three fifths part of black and mixed-race persons were already free, as a result of the processes of limitation carried out since the 16th century at the initiative of employers and slaves and settlers throughout time as a customary right, with the application of the Moret Law, as well as the Pact of Zanjón, the controversial peace treaty without independence which, in fulfillment of its article three, awarded freedom to some 16,000 combatants from both sides, thus equating the rights of those whose fought to eradicate slavery with that of those who, on the side of Spain, shed their slave blood to maintain it. On this matter, the statistical analysis of Piqueras Arenas specifies: Upon completing the slave census of the 25th of January in 1880 it was determined that their number rose to 204,941, 15,345 more than those declared in the 1887 census. There were another 26,758 slaves whose owners reported were added, and 5,365 more had been inscribed in the additional census of 1871 and now were not recognized. It all results that the 32,123 pending classification were slaves not counted in previous censuses and so the ranchers made a new effort to legalize their possession with the goal of prolonging the status. The total of de facto slaves was 231,699. Still in 1881, a year after the publication of the patronage law, the pro- slavers kept requiring extensions in the applications for certificates of entrance of their slaves into the registers. The under-reporting of the number of enslaved beneficiaries of the law was denounced by the Spanish Abolitionist Society, which estimated at 70,000 the individuals hidden from the 1877 census, for "...they were not born after 1870, nor were captured as Maroons, nor are declared to be slaves by the tribunals." An appraisal of the population statistics of the era re-affirms the justice of the complaint, even with the caution with which we should treat it. In July of 1886, the Ranchers Circle reported to the metropolitan administration only 25,000 enslaved, yet the colonial authorities had been informed at the end of 1883 of the existence of 99,556 of the sponsored. If one keeps in mind that the annual average of liberated slaves beginning in 1881 was a little more than 18,000, it is not credible that in only two years (1884-1885) of the enslaved 74,556 had been returned to liberty. The incongruity between the data contributed the the owners and the officially published information is evidence of the fraud committed. During their troubled processes of legal emancipation, enslaved women and men, above all in the urban zones, counted upon the solidarity of family, friends and already freed brothers, and with the active abolitionists as accessories to confront the sophistry of the patrons and the culpable negligence of the functionaries of the Crown. They were required to learn the texts and sub-texts of colonial legislation, but also to apply their knowledge concerning the psychology of the bosses and the virtues and vices of the functionaries. To deal with the traps and subterfuges of our extensive processes of abolition was, for the Cubans descended from Africans, the first lesson in the long apprenticeship of the citizenry they would need to master, now in the 20th century. Alain Basail Rodríguez, in analyzing the role played by the press in the struggle for civil rights that characterized Cuban political events in the last two decades of the 19th century, exemplifies the scenario of confrontation that shaped the deceptive law of 1880 and the measures of repression against protest on the part of the colonial authorities, with suspensions and fines applied in 1882 to the leaders of the newspapers El Demócrata and La Discusión, for their critiques of the limitations and tricks of the rulers, whom the first of these publications considered "...immoral, anti-Christian and a stain that blemishes the national honor before the civilized world." Noteworthy are the scarce references, in these and other texts concerning the press of the era, to sanctions and warnings exercised against the newspapers governed by those of black and mixed-race. The meticulous register of them made by Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux only takes account of the coercive measures adopted, probably at the beginning of 1880, regarding El Pueblo, the first newspaper directed by Martín Morúa Delgado: "The Spanish government, due to the ideas which Martín Morúa Delgado propagated, closed the newspaper in those times, it re-appearing weeks later as a 'politics and general interest weekly' in its second incarnation published on Sundays." Though I have been able to verify the lack of attention that, with exceptions, the Cuban academic and intellectual sector has displayed to the press and to the black journalists of the 19th century--those who were almost made invisible in referential compendiums like the Diccionario de Literatura Cubana--causes additional to prevailing racism might explain the apparent docility of black journalism of the era. Did the attempt to reduce to silence an outstanding person like Morúa Delgado dissuade other black and mulatto journalists from assuming radical positions? Did the ephemeral character of the majority of these publications make it difficult for them to articulate and sustain a clearly anti-racist discourse? Was the contained protest of black journalism one of the unwritten rules imposed by the colonial authorities? Or was the apparent absence of conflicts the result of effective mechanisms of self-censorship? The Printing Law, definitively approved in 1886 represented, without a doubt, a conquest in the battle for civil rights that then raged, an enormous step towards republican civility for which separatists as well as autonomists struggled; even if their liberties and achievements were limited by the mechanisms of political subjection of the metropolis. In his anti-colonial thesis titled Cuba and its judges, Raimundo Cabrera described the atmosphere of civic insecurity, the negligent exercise of imparting justice and the lack of existing legal guarantees, as well as the acts of coercion and intimidation that were performed against the journalists. In his opinion, the Printing Law "...allows the journalist to discuss everything that is not prohibited, that leads to exile or prison if the prohibitions are infringed and which consecrates the immunity of government abuses, converting censure of administrative acts into injuries against the authorities. Given the political and legal fragility of the educated sector of those classified as non-white, whose capacity to maneuver around the colonial powers was far inferior to that of the autonomous press, we presume that the diverse mechanisms of coercion inhibited the radicalness of the press led by blacks and mulattos, until new conditions made it possible once the republic was proclaimed. In the epoch which concerns us, the racial discourse of that minority journalistic sector was characterized, in general, by its insistence on the effort that had to be made by black and mixed-race persons to "overcome" and equalize the quotas of the white man in the fields of education, culture and work. Exhortative messages like the following expressed the immediate aspirations of different classes and strata: ...we shall teach ourselves, improve ourselves, insofar as possible, and detach from all those ulcultivated customs that for a long time have left us in backwardness; we shall relegate to forgetfulness the past rancors and quirks which at present have no object; and in this fashion we shall be prepared to fully enter into the place of human dignity, and progress towards just law will come. At that time, black and illustrious men like Juan Gualberto Gómez, Martín Morúa Delgado and Antonio Maceo constituted, by their conduct or their speech, dangerous examples. Official opinion--of the press, the pro- Spanish societies, clubs and cultural institutions--like the organs and institutions of an autonomist orientation, coincided in promoting as positive roles those blacks and mulattos whose practice was not to radically question the imposed system of domination. It was always so, such that rural folklore--germ of peaceful literary archetypes like Anselmo Suárez y Romero's Francisco--exalted the exceptionality of Juan Francisco Manzano, a tame Negro who, being elevated socially through individual effort, gave evidence of the marvelous effects of European culture upon Afro-Cubans of exceptional potential. Others, like José White and Claudio José Domingo Brindis de Salas, aroused the complacency and admiration of the elites as long as they did not mix in politics. When they did so, whether from sympathy or opinion, the colonial authorities fell upon them as with a foreman's whip, prohibiting or obstructing their visits to the nation. Both died far from Cuba: White in Paris, probably of old age; Brindis de Salas, tuberculosis and alone in Buenos Aires, his greatness trapped in the shine of a gold medal and the opacity of a seedy shelter. The hegemonic power always endows the subaltern with special qualities that justifies the individual recognition and, in exchange for that, does not perturb the functioning of the system. Explain to us, if not, the disappearance of the book of paintings by the martyred José Antonio Aponte, a sort of pre-Negroistic manifesto generated through the artistic talent of a descendent of Africans, who created a world of black protagonists, with battle scenes in which the dark soldiers appeared to be defeating the white military. We imagine another fate for Plácido, if in accord with his intellectual deserts he had been provided the same treatment which "rewarded" with exile conspirators much more compromised in the struggle against the colonial power. We ask what circumstances interposed almost 80 years between the two first editions of the novel Sab and to what was his absence in the Cuban editorial panorama over more than a century due. The decade of the Eighties of the 19th century began to take account of that past of silence by making visible a debate, not so much intense as diverse, concerning how scientific were the indictments of which the Africans and their descenudents were the objects; the economic pertinence and the moral reason for their slavery; the possibilities for social re-insertion by the ex-slaves; and the future of a country with a hobbled colonial economy where the recently emancipated represented an eighth part of the citizenry. Notable literary works of a varied profile are going to accompany the discussions that take place, as almost always, in the higher strata of society, be it in country or town. The period, which begins with the publication in New York of Francisco the ingenious or, the delights of the country (1880) --the novel that Anselmo Suárez y Romero never could have published-- and the definitive version of Cecilia Valdés, continues with the re- publication of the collected texts that Antonio Bachiller y Morales provided as The blacks, and the publication of Poets of color, a precursor anthology by Francisco Calcagno (1887), to conclude with placing in circulation of printed versions of "Dispersion of the human species," a transcendent conference with Felipe Poey about the unity of the human species, and two series of the Philosophical Conferences of Enrique José Varona, in reference to psychology and morality (1888). These works, taken together, speak to us of the new age begun by Cuban society. Following almost a hundred years of preparation of the Africans and their descendents to integrate into society and carry citizenship cards, in 1886 the economic and political circumstances forced the formal abolition of slavery in Cuba, more than half a century after England and almost 40 years later than in France. The Royal Order of the 8th of October was celebrated in the cities with popular street parades, which achieved their maximum brilliance on the 1st of January in 1887, with a civic parade in the Central Park zone. There, "blacks on horseback, musical bands, various orchestras, sororities and brotherhoods and also cabals with their typical outfits...traversed the streets with displays dedicated to representative political figures... The manifestation closed with a float, protected by a cordon of wagons and pulled by four horses with a youth who represented liberty and was dressed in the colors of the Spanish flag..." However, soon the shameful social situation that slavery represented erupted into social trauma, for the colonial regime did not even propose a timid program of assistance like "Radical Reconstruction" in the United States, which we well know did not reconstruct the system of social relations based upon classist and racial hierarchization nor was it truly radical, but distributed a part of the lands monopolized by the southern landlords, widened the labor market and offered opportunities for apprenticeship in the trades to the most impoverished population groups, the blacks in the first place. In the plantations and ranches, thousands of men and women lacerated by a regime of intensive exploitation and a total ignoring of their human condition received the new good in psychic, work and spatial disorientation, vacillating between the fear of an uncertain future and the desire to extend their freedoms. The elders--Manuel Moreno Fraginals recalls--"incapable of adapting themselves to wage work, inept even in understanding the new relations of economic dependence, lacking food, clothing and the roof that since infancy they had had in the plantation, descended to the last level of social degradation. With sticks and leaves they constructed their minimal housing on the edge of any road and dedicated themselves to dying little by little." Others launched new pathways with the sole desire of going as far as possible from the ranch or the plantation where they suffered so many misfortunes, to encounter systems of labor which had barely renounced the whip and fetters. As laborers, servants or recently hired workers, the nation was for them a gigantic plantation. The abolition of slavery did not of itself contribute to the reduction of racial pressures, a question that has been reviewed by various scholars of the thought and the social imagination of the era. In order to adjust the mechanisms of domination to the new economic and political context, and legitimate the subordinate position of the descendents of Africans in the nascent republican regimes of America, the native elites re-denominated the relations of subordination, reinforced the racial barriers and made great efforts to remove the subject from the political discussion, anchoring the racist speech in the somewhat inaccessible terrain of theoretic thought. With the founding of the South American republics began the articulation of coloniality, which is no more than the cultural assimilation of a subordinate condition, expressed in different fields, such as work and its products; nature and her productive resources; the sexes and the reproduction of the species; subjectivity and its material products, and intersubjective, including knowledge; as well as authority and its instruments of coercion, all areas of social activity where the color of the skin constitutes a differentiating attribute. The demise of the slave system in Europe and North America was an influential factor in the slow decline of polygenetics as a doctrine, and also the consolidation of materialism and positivism in the scientific domain and in everyday thought; yet at the same time it stimulated the expansion, on the academic plane, of eugenic ideas, with the consequent inclusion in the curricula of future biologists and doctors of the postulates of the father of genetics, Gregor Johann Mendel, the hereditary theories of Francis Galton, and Cesare Lombroso's thesis about the degenerative physical traits that characterize delinquents and, by extension, the marginalized sectors of the population, a position that in the case of Cuba was attributed predominantly to the Africans and their descendents. The anthropologist Armando Rangel Rivero recalls for us: Cuban research was oriented to racial and medical questions associated with physical anthropology. There were polemics concerning prostitution, polygamy, sexual abuses committed against women, and a preoccupation with the retirement of benefits for slaves associated with the mortality provoked by the unhealthiness and abysmal hygienic conditions, and sterility of the women from frequent uterine infections and spontaneous or provoked abortions. The Darwinian thesis concerning natural selection and the evolutionary perspective on social change maintained by Herbert Spencer reached their maximum diffusion in the first third of the 20th century, through institutionalization of eugenics as a field of study and social program. With its supposed "scientific" intervention into the natural process of reproduction of society, eugenics proposed to fulfill the promise of progressive betterment of the human species and to embody the ideal of homogeneous national communities, through planned operations of "social cleansing" which, as time passed, became oriented principally towards ethical and racial dimensions. Since then, the ideal of whitening and the aspiration to "improve the race," that still forms part of the life projects of not a few people in our lands, were pretended to be known through theoretical knowledge. Embedded in the culture, validated by science and naturalized through social practice, slavery prolonged mental subjections and cultural subordinations beyond just proclamations and decrees. Esteban Montejo, the last Cuban "cimarrón," was referring to this when he testified: "Now all the blacks are free. In that freedom according to them, because to me it seems that the horrors continued. And the masters, or better, owners believed that blacks were made for paddock and cowhide. Then he treated them equally. To me many blacks had not taken notice of how things were, for they kept saying, 'My boss, bless him.'" During the Eighties of the 19th century, the ideal configuration for the nation, legitimated by the intellectual canonization of the so-called Cuban reformist Enlightenment, while this was counteracted by the emergence of popular levels and by the existence of a community split in two parts--racially and culturally heterogeneous--which the racial fraternity of the liberation struggle did not manage to approach sufficiently. The abolition of slavery is done in a society submerged in an identity crisis, as the result of a social change characterized by alteration of the political, economic, legal, cultural, and communicational contexts; a process whose principal variables the colonial system of domination could neither reconcile nor channel. With the primary discourse of the nation debilitated by the flowering of racial prejudices once the war was ended, with references missing to the group identities of the emergent citizens, the legal emancipation incorporated other tensions into the reconstruction of what had already been a crumbling identity. Concerning the impact that the group identity of the new citizens had in the process of ending slavery in the United States, only 20 years previously, W. E. B. Dubois noted: "From the double life every American Negro must live, as a Negro and as an American, as swept on by the current of the nineteenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century - from this must arise a painful self-consciousness, an almost morbid sense of personality, and a moral hesitancy which is fatal to self-confidence." I presume that many ex-slaves in Cuba suffered psychological traumas similar to those described by W. E. B. DuBois. It is the probably explanation of the fact that an experience as heartbreaking as slavery comprises a "worm hole" in our colloquial histories, in the style of some science fiction narratives. The 20th century assumed as a painful matter of the past or a remembrance with a bad taste; on the everyday scale slavery was a taboo topic, not only because of the difficulty of uncovering ancestors beyond the second or third generations, but instead, and above all, due to the shame. Many black and mixed-race families were prideful to include a "mambi," someone who collaborated with a distinguished patriot, attained an honorable profession or displayed properties. Scarce, however, are those who have lifted someone enslaved from the mists of the past, even is they were to end becoming a worthy "cimarrón." It becomes a tautological truth that any sort of social relation based upon the exercise of power by some over an entourage of subordinates and dependents, who assume specific powers of codification in the mind of the individual and collective subjects, constructing modes of social behavior transmissible via the generations, or induced by intricate processes of social osmosis. In the final analysis, the differentiating social representations--whatever be the attribute that originates them--are socially distributed through cultural forms which infiltrate all the domains of everyday life, to the extent that they connote and reproduce mechanisms of relegation or social exclusion which naturalize inequality and legitimate, on the symbolic plane, the power relations. In the Americas, such a naturalization process began with slavery; if indeed it still is the motive for polemics among students of inter-racial relations in Cuba, how much of the actual permanence of prejudices for reasons of color can be credited to our past slavery. The positive histriographic focus, so attached to the data and to recording of inertial processes, attributes the disfunctionalities of today to a past not overcome, given the persistence in the social imagination of hierarchical systems systems based on skin color. Others, among them a good part of the anti-racialist activists, evade this type of argument as a trap in the woods, worried because it becomes an eternal justification for ignoring the mechanisms of reconstruction, diffusion and legitimation of racial prejudices in the nation. Nevertheless, the reticence in considering the effect of historical factors upon the problems of the present obstructs the vision of the roots of a tree that grows on the original substratum where it receives, in some measure, similar nourishment. The focus upon persons of dark skin, of all the social traumas inherited from colonialism and slavery, excludes analysis of the middle of the equation, making it insoluble; it ignores the significant character of the skin color in any power relation that by virtue of its pronounced assymetry becomes a relationship of domination, and it anchors in the past a socio- historical process whose intellectualization is the task of the present. The slavery of the blacks engendered the slavery of the whites, the minister Félix Varela wisely noted, and racism--the offspring of both-- sickened the whole society. Up to today, we coexist with "...a sorrow emerging from slavery; mistreated and uncured during the war years; which mestastasized at the beginning of the republican period, when the blacks saw their civic rights and their participation in the government of the country limited; and, as an hereditary disease, in the new generation of Cubans, an adequate treatment to cure it has still not been found." Foreign power, exercised against the grain of the geographic and cultural distance between Spanish oppression and Cuban-ness which struggled to be born, characterized by pillage, despotism and the objectification of thousands of human beings, could not obtain the consent of the country even though they might be seen as subjects, on the basis of parents or lineage. The Creole landlords and ranchers, subjected to a system of economic exploitation and political subordination, were rejected for their psychology, their customs and above all, for their aspirations to autonomy. The legalistic machinery of the metropolis erected a network of legislation to restrict the Spaniards from overseas economically and politically. The prohibition of commerce with competitor nations or enemies of Spain; the penalization of contraband with neighboring islands, also ruled from Europe; the enormous imposed charges required by the Crown; and the illegalization of the slave trade, figure among the orders repeatedly unfulfilled by the Creole elite, the principal financing of the palatial extravagance and the military campaigns of the decadent Spanish empire. "Acknowledged but not fulfilled," was the response of the inhabitants of the Hispano-american colonies to the draconian laws of the metropolis; a social practice so prevalent in Cuba that our first literary text, Mirror of patience, has as leitmotiv the efforts of the Spanish authorities to suppress the flourishing contraband in the Bayamo region, putting the excesses to rest of the pirate Gilberto Girón, kidnapper of the bishop Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, who was sent by the king to those venues to call their unruly denizens to order. Besides the coloring of their skin, the logic of the functioning of colonial society required the natives to cultivate qualities such as violence, hedonism, hypocrisy, and laziness; and the violations of the king's subjects had their extension in the attitude of the slaves toward their masters, and of the free blacks and mulattos with respect to the local authorities, tax collectors and other functionaries charged with the fulfillment of the law. The form in which today the necessity is explained of resolving by any means possible what is needed or desired; the social acquiescence in informal exchange, popularly designated the "black market" and other actions to avoid the benefits, authority or external rights, recalling the rogue posses of persons from different classes and levels in our early 17th century. When in 1830 José Antonio Saco, imbued with the concerns of the members of the Patriotic Society of Havana, thought to suggest cures in his Memoria de la vagancia en la Isla de Cuba, for the "moral infirmities" that the nation suffered, centering on problems which still are seen today, or have emerged in our society catalyzed by new conditions. The traversal, ample in its options, from different betting variants to the alienating warlike entertainments offered by digital technology, continues to discount for the nation innumerable hours of productive contributions. Unchecked behaviors that desacralize the solemnity of the religious festivals--of which the excess of alcoholic libations during the pilgrimage of San Lázaro is an example--seem distant from the calm simulation of Catholic faith in which we were educated. The insufficient concern of the families to shape the destiny of their children--something that in our day not a few unconscious parents want to leave in the hands of the State--still suckles grown-up children who aspire to obtain rewards without exerting great efforts. The scant exploitation of fertile lands seems to be badly endemic which positions us against the sea, awaiting not only fishes, but also bread and many other things. Saco's intelllectual ventures opened pathways for the moral salvation of the dissolute youth of the affluent classes and the social elevation of others, equally white, whom he considered capable of challenging and even displacing the cultivation of the arts by people of color, whose pre-eminence in such laborious and delicate offices seemed to Saco a "bitterly lamentable disgrace." We do not forget, however, that the higher classes and strata of the native population had to impose their hegemony over those within while they erected barriers against that which impinged on them from outside, not solely in the political and economic domains, but also in the cultural and the psychological, being heirs to cultures gnererated in stationary societies obsessed by purity of blood. Therefore the eagerness for social progress, transferred to the racial dimension, cannot be ascribed solely to the Cuban women and men of the darkest complexion. The ideal of whitening--of the skin or of the lineage--is highlighted in the ironical prose of Gastón Baquero: The white Creole hastened to enrich themself and buy a title, in order to equate to the whiteness of the Crown. One of mixed-race, insofar as they could, would arrange to marry with a white, in order to "advance," to approximate pure white. The mulatto, if she had not come out too chocolate --"backward," we say in Cuba--also slid, cautiously, like a cat, towards the immediately higher rung, and at the guard's first carelessness inscribed herself as white. The actual and symbolic violence of the relations of domination enthroned by colonialism and by slavery, re-codified according to the socio-historical context, subsists in our historical memory, as a somewhat dynamic accumulation of understandings, values, representations, and feelings about the past. Not only as memories covering events, processes or specific figures, but also as approximative understandings concerning the past, those memories, which for methodological imperatives historical science formulates as unitary, presupposing different levels of interpretation and explanation, in accord with the vital experience of persons and groups, and the relations between them, as much on the social level--political and labor relations, economic, cultural and spiritual interactions--as on the personal - family ties, friendships, weddings, et cetera. Thus, observation of the Santiago Creole Hypolitte Piron transcends the historical circumstance of the 19th century and the spatial limit of his birth city, in order to nest in perceptions that might explain some of the inter- racial tensions that are observed here and now: In Cuba there are the whites, those who manage to pass as such, there are the quarter-bloods, there are the mulattos, there are the kinked and, finally, the blacks. Spanish prejudice is so powerful that it pushes the unhappy victims to feel ashamed of their own selves, and to deprecate each other. Those who have white skin try to pass for them, adore the whites, make common cause with them and look down on their brothers of darker skin. The social praxis of human groups and communities rests on interpretations of reality inherited over successive processes of generational reconstruction, in the internalization of roles, idealization of membership and group references, and in the social self-positioning that determines the activity of the subjects representing the cultural inheritance. Only thus is it possible to comprehend the functionality of the stereotyped representations of the racial other in the existing Cuban society, when these are applied to the interpretation of processes and events with respect to which persons position themselves or participate, often in an instinctive manner. Attitudes forged in a social milieu characterized by its accentuated stratification, and by dehumanizing practices in the exercise of power, can outlive the causes that gave them origin and fasten, with adaptive mutations, in people's psyche. If this occurs, these will tend to reproduce relations of domination even though the conditions are different, unless the functioning of the society--with its system of weights and counterweights, social politics in the actual exercise of a social democracy--corrects the asymmetry of power. Meanwhile, the economic, cultural and psychological subordination of the previously subordinated groups will be maintained; and the violence, open or covert, explicit or symbolic, will be exercised by the dominant cultural patrons to preserve the accumulation of historical advantages, to re-affirm or improve social positioning, to capitalize upon the power of representing the national and re-defining, whenever it seems desirable, the ideal configuration of the nation. Since the first third of the past century the springs of this type of conduct has been studied, inherited and transmitted in strongly stratified societies by virtue of ethnic or racial classifications. The German anthropologist Franz Boas called it the "race instinct of the white," and defined its essence as "...a repetition of old instincts and fear of inter- marriage between patricians and plebeians, between the European nobility and the common people or in the castes of India. The feelings and rationalizations put into play are the same in every regard..."; later clarifying: "...the so-called instinct is not from physiological repugnance... It is more properly an expression of social conditions so deeply buried in ourselves that they assume a strong emotional value." Moreover, certain theses concerning the innate nature of the instincts and the practical manifestation of an "inheritance of psychic or affective dispositions"--as Sigmund Freud indistinctly called them--have led to interesting debates, interchanges complicated by studies of the hereditary character of behaviors, whose development would open the doors to a new specialty: the genetics of conduct. In Cuba, theorizing about the influence of heredity and the environment reached its greatest virulence during the first third of the 20th century, as a reaction to the slow but persistent social ascent of the natives descended from Africans and the growth of Caribbean emigration that, in response to the demand for a workforce in the sugar fields, introduced 32,594 braceros in Cuba between 1916 and 1919, and 43,311 in the six years 1923-1928, according to statistics compiled by Juan Pérez de la Riva. An example of the hold of such preoccupations in the academic and social domains was the celebration in Havana of the First Pan-American Conference on Eugenics and Homecare, an event which under the auspices of the government of Gerardo Machado included representatives of 16 countries in the Americas. The studies concerning criminality carried out by the Israeli doctor and anthropologist Israel Castellanos González, constituted the most persistent exercise in in applying eugenics and the Lombrosian theories to the stigmatization of the black population in Cuba. In an era characterized by positivism to the extreme, with its fanatical adherence to statistics and its resistance to transcending mere description of phenomena, various of the works published by Israel Castellanos were charged with racist predispositions, among them: Evolution of Negro dance in Cuba (1914), The sorcerer type (1914), Psychology of the Cuban masses (1915), Contribution to the craneometric study of the delinquent Negro man (1916), The somatic stigmas of degeneration: their assessment in the colored race (1927), and Female delinquency in Cuba (1929). In the last of the cited works, a discursive research report in three volumes, the author utilizes the racial composition of the prison population --ignoring attributes or particularities of a social character--to conclude: "...delinquency is increasing in step with greater cutaneous pigmentation, that is, that it keeps augmenting in relation with the degree to which the skin is darkening...is unquestionable, such that the blacks are more delinquent than the mulattos and these more so than the whites." It was 1929, a year of great tensions in the Cuban labor market, accentuated by recent and sustained migrations of farmworkers toward the largest of the Antilles, above all Haitians and Jamaicans; a process that would be interrupted by a long period of recession in the United States economy with its disastrous international consequences, above all for the nations subjected to neo-colonial northern politics. The arrival of thousands of Antillean workers, legalized by the governments of José Miguel Gómez and Mario Garcia Menocal as representatives of the hegemonic social groups, satisfied the need for cheap hands for the expansive Cuban sugar industry, yet the indomitable racism of the owning classes of the island grew. Campaigns against witchcraft and their accusations as propagating agents of disease transferred to the Haitians the demonization that before had fallen on the Africans. Their economic fragility, legal defenselessness and socio-cultural differences with respect to the black strata of Cuba, caused the Haitian migrant to be credited with all the negative images which the enslaved African had monopolized. The combination of certain historical antecedents with the socio-political conjunction, and their growth due to the prejudices of the time, might explain another of the paragraphs written by Castellanos González: The great number of Antilleans of color introduced into Cuba during these last years, women as well as men, are notably influencing the arc of our criminality, and yes, as doctor Le Roy has demonstrated, they are anti- hygienic, and we are on the path to gathering the documents that will permit us to prove they are also anti-social..." We should not be surprised that such derogatory opinions were emitted by the medical profession. Similar pronouncements, expressive of the eugenic prejudices that weighed upon the human sciences of the period, were used to segregate, suppress and deport the Antillean braceros who fattened the fortunes of the United States monopolies in the banana enclave of Puerto Limón and in the work on the Panama canal. Similarly, hard-working Chinese immigrants were persecuted and stripped of their goods in México, in the midst of a campaign to discredit them undertaken by the elites and the press, who designated them "criminals, carriers of horrible diseases and opposed to western civilization." The emergence of eugenics in the first years of the 20th century was the result "...of the Victorian middle-class fears of the militant working class of European origin; the existence of a recently emancipated population of African origin; the social transformations that accompanied the industrialization and the urbanization; and the necessity of providing a rationalization for the colonial subjugation of the non-European populations..." Nevertheless, at the end of the Twenties eugenics had overturned the conservative aspiration towards betterment of the "inferior races" proclaimed by Francis Galton, and was oriented to combat the increase in births in the marginalized sectors of the capitalist societies, to justify the politics of social segregation and to control the migratory flows of persons not classified as white, even in societies characterized by elevated inter-marriage. That its upswing should coincide with the so-called critical decade is not by chance; the expansion of eugenics as theoretic knowledge proposed to counteract social thought characterized by the "rediscovery" of African art; the expansion of pan-Africanism; the maturation of a new type of nationalism, unfailingly anti-imperialist, in our America; and the revival of the African heritage which the Negritude movement realized. This evolutionary theory was assumed by the national american elites, incapable of repudiating the system of colonial exploitation that lifted them socially and little disposed to coexist, on an equal footing, with the descendents of the enslaved. Politics of population control supported by eugenics justified "the court," a euphemism employed to refer to the killing of more than ten thousand Haitians ordered by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo in 1937; the deportation suffered in the same year in Cuba by hundreds of persons of that nationality, by decision of the government of Federico Laredo Bru; and the prohibitions imposed upon the Central American banana republics against the immigration of Antillean blacks, under the pretext of protecting the labor market from foreign competition. It is well to remember that the International Congress of Eugenics, held in London in 1912, had demanded greater intervention by governments in the control of human reproduction. In 1919, the French doctor Charles Richet--awarded the Nobel prize in the specialty six years previously--in his work Human selection declared in favor of the elimination of all the recently born who might exhibit some hereditary defect. More attenuated yet with similar objectives, the commander Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and president of the British Eugenics Education Society between 1911 and 1928, recommended politics that would stimulate "superior" individuals to procreate and inhibit "inferiors" from doing so. In the United States, the scientistic propaganda of the American Eugenics Society influenced 30 state governments to approve sterilization laws during the period 1907-1931. Nor is it a secret that these United States medical practices were taken as the model for the design of certain "population politics" of Nazism and offered theoretical-methodological support to the German Society for Racial Hygiene. A great addition to the reversal of eugenic and Lombrosian tendencies in the human sciences in Cuba was made by Fernando Ortíz who, in the third decade of the past century, began to erode the dikes of the science constructed from the European colonialist viewpoint, until breaching them with primary works like The hoax of the races, published in 1946. The professorship, the radio and the press were used by the wise Cuban to argue that: "The mental differences between human groups are not a question of race, but instead of culture. They do not arise naturally, but by construction. Among the races there are no innate hierarchies of intelligence, of emotion nor of ethics." During more than a century the scientific polemic relative to the influence of heredity and the environment in human beings continued without resolving itself, a situation evidenced in the debate which, in 1969, provoked the article published by the United States psychologist Arthur Jensen in the Harvard Educational Review. In that text the author attributed genetic causes to the difference in intelligence quotients among white and black persons in the United States. One dealt, neither more nor less, with the intellectual return of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Alfred Rosenberg and Houston S. Chamberlain, sustained by a discipline that saw itself as the basis for a new scientific-technical revolution. The partisans for the decisive influence of the environment insist that "...no single individual gene is known that accounts for a significant proportion of the individual differences in any type of complex conduct. When one speaks of genetic influence on conduct we refer to the association between individual genetic differences and differences in behavior among the individuals of a given population..." Although the genetics of behavior has not achieved convincing demonstrations of its theories, its specialists attribute an hereditary character to various personality traits, among them: emotionality, capacity to work, levels of activity, sociability, propensity for leadership, imagination, aggressivity, and capacity for self-regulation. Other perspectives propose the existence and interaction of various types of heredity, some of which are not associated with genetic structure, but instead to information transmission mechanisms of a behavioral or symbolic character. These theories explain the recurrence in individuals of the same family of linguistic abilities, gestural language, body postures, feeling, psychological predispositons, stresses, creative talent, and forms of re-elaborating the historical memory that sustains, on a personal scale, the system of values. The predominant opinion is that "Radical environmentalism has been losing ground within the social sciences, and there are few psychologists who do not concede a more or less important place to biological factors in the determination of conduct, such that heredity and environment interact with each other bringing about the result of human conduct." A scientific conclusion fully demonstrable in the case that now occupies us, for the genetic inheritance traceable in the phenotype (skin color, hair type, layout of the features), socially codified through stereotypes that permeate the social environment and affect perceptions and behaviors, yielding inferior negative experiences to the subjects, who construct personality traits where the introversion and the extroversion enunciated by Jung compete - sometimes in the same person, according to the context. Thus, the emotionality and the sociability of those persons who feel themselves victims of racial subordination are strongly impacted by mental processes that reduce their self-esteem and augment their defense mechanisms before potential threats in the environment. In Brazil, a nation with whom we share a slave past with historical affinities and symmetries sedimented in the culture, such behaviors were identified throughout the 20th century as "discrimination culture," "defeatist philosophy" or "culture of defeat." The personality traits, externalized in the relations of adults with the youngest, in family narratives about the past and the present, in the exercise of social and family roles, in phobias and preferences, and even in the traditional games and songs that are taught the children; they can be transmissible as the result of everyday intimate human interaction. I confirm such a criterion upon reading the testimony which, concerning the reduction of his ancestors to the condition of slaves, was offered by an Afro-American religious leader: "The legacy of slavery has had a devastating effect on our people collectively, influencing the way we feel about ourselves and how we visualize our past and our future... I think that each generation not only endows its strength but also its pain." In any class society the dominated, relegated or excluded people continue to develop, throughout their lives, and arsenal of non-violent techniques that permit them to avoid threats and diverse disadvantages, through indifference, humor and the friendly reply; or reduce their consequences through the editing of reality, which is nothing more than selective registry--in the memory and the emotions--of events relevant to their vital experience. In our time, these processes or re-elaborating experience have been profusely studied, to evaluate their impact on the self-esteem of marginalized or socially disadvantaged groups. Minimizing this underestimation or discrimination of which one is the everyday victim transfers the tranquilizing effect to the affected group and offers psychological recompense for confronting the inter-racial tensions of the social medium. Without such mechanisms of rationalization, our ancestors would have succumbed morally to the ignominious experience of slavery. Nevertheless, two centuries later, there still subsists in our imagination the perception that the vigor of their bodies saved the mixed races and African blacks from a genocide similar to that suffered by the original population of Cuba. Furthermore I think that their principal bulwark was the strength of their minds, their capacity to confront adversity and reverse it in a partial or temporary way, despite doing so at a dreadful disadvantage. In the admired conclusion we find in reading Changó, the biggest badass, that story of America told through tears and blood, yet also through the faith and the valor of her darkest sons. In it, men and women share roof, dangers and risks with their Orishas, sustained by the muntu philosophy, that way of life which conceives the family as "...the sum of the defunct (ancestors) and the living, united by the word to the animals, to the trees, to the elements (earth, water, fire, stars) and to tools, in an indissoluble knot." The characterization of persons and environments, the rhythm of narration and the way in which the tales of a different historical time are threaded, could remind one that the novel of the Colombian Manuel Zapata Olivella is only well-crafted fiction. Yet in reality it deals with reconstructing the half century of history which, shattered and fragmented into a thousand pieces, was offered us as anecdotal consolation for the rebellion of the blacks in the Americas, a meta-narrative whose continuities and shifts are only perceptible in the loving gaze of the mother who saw her children leave, in chains, to write a new chapter in the history of the world. Induced forgetfulness, the insurmountable trauma of not knowing one's origin and even the name that one's ancestors bequeathed, and the set of family stories where silence functioned as a shield against the pain, relates --in the anguish and the memories--the Cubans descended from Africans with millions of persons in the world whose genetic inheritance, externalized in their physiognomies, becomes a socially relevant attribute. Recently, we Cuban readers have had access to the historical and genetic inquiry which, conducted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., involved an ambitious research project into almost two dozen successful Afro-americans. The greater part of them confronted the painful voyage into the past through baptismal registries, patrimonial declarations of slave owners, epistolary archives, judicial transcripts, personal diaries, and journal notices; and experienced all the pain of their enslaved antecedents, admired for the unequal fight they launched to vindicate their human condition. One of the testimonies recovered in such a valuable work concerns the impact of slavery in the life of United States Africans: "350 years will not change the mental attitude toward slavery in a perceptible way, such that the whites, many of them, suppose that they are still better than me for the color of their skin. That the white color of their skin makes them better than me... Equally, many blacks, even when they do not admit it, feel inferior due to their history..." In our nation, the conditioning that three centuries of classist and racist domination exercised upon the self-esteem of the darkest persons, seemed to be negated for some time by the installation of a more benevolent slavery than that instituted in the French, British and Dutch colonies, where the cultural difference from Africa, the absenteeism of the planters or the stubborn catechism campaigns carried out by parishes and missionaries, were contrasted with the Africanization of the Spanish culture, the racial mixtures forced by the coexistence of masters and slaves, and the religious permissiveness utilized by the nation's cabals as an escape valve and tool to control the Africans and their descendents. Such arguments ignore the explanations associated with the process of populating the Cuban archipelago. The African diaspora reached it greatest level in the first two thirds of the 19th century, when the insular society claimed its economic interests as against the metropolis, reaffirmed its psychological and cultural peculiarities, founded its own institutions, and slowly assimilated the practices and knowledge of its nannies, cooks, musicians, and artisans; until the participation in the independence efforts of the Africans and their descendents together with the white Creoles, cemented the construction of a new nationality. From which we deduce not that in Cuba the Africans and mixed races were subject to a "better" slavery, but that they offered greater resistance to the cultural dispossession inherent in that system of domination. Slavery was never bearable or easy, not even in the patriarchal cohabitation of the baronial mansions, for the relation between masters and slaves never renounced the objectification of the subordinate subject, the exploitation and forced possession of their bodies, the psychological violence, the stigmatization, and the disregard. The Cuban reformist enlightenment always recognized the right to freedom of the "blacks of the nation" and their island descendents, even if they feared the effects of immediate emancipation of the enslaved. At the end of the 19th century, a good part of middle- and upper-class Cubans had not managed to submerge their apprehensions, fearful that the loosening of liberties for the enslaved group might give way to vengeance, disorder and violence; a sentiment perceptible in Francisco Calcagno's prologue to his novel, The Crimes of Concha: Cuban scenes, written in 1863 but published in 1887, barely a year after the formal abolition of slavery: "What we must do today is to publicize the emancipated by all media possible. It is not enough to make them free but to make them worthy of liberty. Teach them that freedom is worthless unless it is based upon love of order and work, upon respect for the law, on patriotism properly understood." Such an admirable intention, characteristic of the most progressive sectors of the white Cuban intelligentsia, nevertheless presents a mirage: it predicated love from those who only received disrespect and mistreatment; it urged conscientious displicpline upon those who were taught to respond to the crack of a whip; it attempted to present work to them as duty and right, while imposing it as a dehumanizing and inexcusable obligation. In any event, the philanthropic indulgence of the critics of slavery was unaware of the multiple talents that the blacks and mulattos, at last free, had added to the inherited wisdom of their African ancestors, men who "...knew how to build houses, administer empires, construct cities, cultivate the fields, extract the minerals, weave the cotton, forge the steel..." and whose women contributed, from the innocent intimacy of the children's room, not a few of the cultural admixtures that comprise us as a nation, as Reynaldo González argues: The games oriented to the black children are usually infantile African amusements, which pass in words and gestures to the receptive perception of the white child. The songs that they learn come directly from Africa, accustoming their hearing to a musicality which differs from the peninsular, towards a new auditory sensibility, rhythms they will identify in nurseries and popular fairs when they grow up, also translated to aristocratic salons in the unstoppable inter-mixing of society. The Great War was a catalyst for the integrative mix of the Cuban; not as a mixture of fluids that exchange liquids and transmute colors, but instead as the collision of opposing forces--domination and resistance--that precipitates a new nature. Some victories in the struggle for civil rights for blacks and mulattos were the authorization to enter secondary schools, professional schools and the university (1878); the end of the segregation of parochial books by color (1881); access to the parks, gardens and walkways (1882); the possibility of occupying first-class cars on the trains (1887); and the custom of using the address of "Mr." and "Mrs." (1893). Though "fear of the Negro" and the satanization carried out by the fundamentalist press tried to exercise a counterweight to the tardy measures adopted by the colonial administration to diminish the inter-racial tensions and remain alert to new independence conspiracies. The fear of the subordinate subject is a feeling profoundly rooted in the psyche of those who benefit from the inferiorization, for exercising dominion over others does not relieve the fear that the relation might weaken or be subverted, perhaps that the barriers of caste, color or social origin be transposed; the subjects conspire to organize resistance, or because successive inarticulate rebellions soften the cohesion of the groups who dominate. That fear, almost never admitted, structures perceptions of threat before the economic empowerment of the subalterns--how can one forget the Escalera conspiracy--; and their political protagonism--aspirations that cost the lives of the leaders of the Independent Party of Color and hundreds of innocent persons--; or personal advancement that becomes sufficient to endow the deprecated subjects with qualities and resources which favor their social ascent. The anti-slavery radicalism and the military leadership of the mulatto admiral José Prudencio Padilla brought him before a firing squad, accused by the general Mariano Montilla, military commander of Cartagena de Indias, of conspiring against Simón Bolívar. Imputations of a personal character --almost always exaggerated or uncertain--limited the military performance of the generals José Maceo and Guillermón Moncada, and more than once put them under the command of less competent officers than themselves, but lighter and of more elevated social origins than them. Two months after the onset of the "necessary war," Manuel de la Cruz, the only Cuban writer who reflected in his work the contributions of the blacks and mulattos during the war of '68, still argued against the "fear of the Negro" that undermined the unity of the independence movement. Once the Spanish colonial power was defeated, black and mixed-race persons tried to profit from the scant opportunities conferred by their new condition as citizens, centering their main efforts on their children. That is reflected in the census statistics of the first republican decade: in only eight years--from 1899 to 1907--literacy among those over ten grew from 24 to 45%, seven percentage points above that of the whites from a similar populational segment; and the adolescents between ten and 14 in age who knew how to read and write almost equalled the 70% attained by their white counterparts. The gradual social emergence of the blacks and mulattos since the advent of the neo-colonial bourgeois republic, later catapulted by the radicalism of the Cuban revolution, is the result of a sustained effort whose psychological costs--not always perceptible--deserve to be appreciated. My interest in unveiling the fissures produced by slavery which survive within our social intersubjectivity--aside from the effect of the extraordinary social dispensation conferred on all Cubans after 1959--starts from a report of damages that the Haitian poet and essayist René Depestre added to our memory of slave life and servile subordination, while still active in the radical left: The historical action of the cimarrons could not, however, conjure away the activities of Uncle Tom-ism, terror and shame at being Negro, cultural dualism and inhibition, the abdication of being before seeming, psychic bipolarism, an inferiority complex, compensatory aggression, the negation of oneself, intellectual Bovarism, imitative behavior, the forms of socialized ambivalence, and other psychological disorders that still characterize the behavior of many blacks and mulattos in our societies. More than a quarter century after these conclusions, it seems pertinent to ask ourselves: Depestre's characterization, referring to the American ex- colonies, is it applicable to the case of Cuba?; does the psychological damage generated by our slave past affect only persons classified as black or mulatta, or do its marks lacerate the being of Cubans of every color?; have we freed ourselves totally from the mental strictures, from shackles of the memory? TRAIT NO.1 SHAME AT NEGRITUDE AS OPPOSED to anguish and fear, feelings that can be undergone in solitude, shame is always the result of interaction with others. It is manifested as recoiling before persons who have qualities, conditions, appearance, knowledge, or possibilities of which we lack; an historic dissatisfaction: the pain of not being, not existing, not having been taken into account. It is also the internalization of a critique of oneself for the manner she has acted, or for a lack of action. Shame, while a sentiment generated by our social nature, does not arise from the imagination nor constitute an abstract experience. Shame about oneself repels the image--always fragmented, diffuse, incomplete--that the society has placed upon the pertinent group, like the meanings and emotional contents that derive from it. Shame in oneself is a lacerating and self-destructive feeling. It is a yoke of steel that begins and ends in pain. Much has been said and written throughout our history about the contributions of the Africans and their descendents on our ways of being and acting. The disqualifying visions of the lettered elite--of which José Antonio Saco and Domingo del Monte, among others, left written testimony-- contend with a history of freedom struggles, social and cultural, to configure a social representation of black persons' psychology in which stereotypes of a positive and negative sign are intermixed. Almost always avoiding the historical conditioning and underestimating the African cultures, that collage of stereotypes has been defined over time, until today it articulates the social representations of the darkest Cubans who predominate today. They are daughters of an ideal reconstruction of the nation that incorporated--by the 20th century--the contribution of Africa to Cuban national existence. In Cuban ethnic liberation, one of his most well-known works, Elías Entralgo performs an impromptu anthropological inventory of the hybrid psychology of the Cuban, highlighting the influence in it of African culture: Between suckling the breast, rocking the cradle or the swaying of coitis, not a few characteristics were transferred from the black to the whites, some defective--exaggeration, mytho-mania, improvisation, an action of the will which is excitement, inconstancy, superficiality, remedialism, chicanery, that looking askance at progress that is change, superstition, irresponsibility--and others virtuous--physical resistance, bodily dexterity, loyalty, an ardent emotional sensibility, sense of music, spirit of sacrifice, expansion, happiness, ingenuity, cultivation of laughter and inclination to joke, good will and easy humor (and for those last five characteristics 49 percent participation, at least, in the enjoyment), fantasy--and deriving from virtue and becoming defects out of excess: super-passionate love even prejudicial to the children, idolatrous cults of lubricious, lascivious dance... The view of Marcelo Pogolotti extends to the field of ethnology, in observing: Apart from the ostensible effect upon the lexicon and on music, the expanded presence of the African races has reverberated in the beliefs, superstitions, character, and national temperament, imparting to the Cuban a mixture of spontaneity, carefreeness, joy, and joking mimicking humor, as well as an exceptional capacity to adapt that distinguishes all his brothers on the continent... It is to be expected that in the near future the resentments inherited from slavery may be erased and mixed with discrimination with its sequel of inferiority complexes... From the memory trunk that Loló de la Torriente explored in order to offer his Testimony from within, we extracted his particular vision of the African contribution to Cuban culture: From the Negro we obtained nostalgia, the daydream and that vital impulse towards freedom and rebellion. No people who have been conquered can be happy. Conquest and possession recap a state of dramatic impotence that cannot give wings to true happiness, the product of a state of serene felicity... The blacks sang and danced, as if hallucinated, their nostalgia and drama. We seek in these judgments the traces of the defensive conduct that the Africans and their descendents had to assume when they were still talking tools, Let us reflect upon the compensatory function of the natural happiness that is attributed to blacks. We inquire whether the improvisation and irresponsibility are or are not the defensive tactic of one who knows themself as the property of another and cannot decide between one's acts. We evaluate whether the ingenuity and wit necessary to deride the oppressive ordinances of the masters can be seen as forms of intellectual confrontation. We ask whether the efforts deployed by the enslaved to conquer their freedom and that of their loved ones are indicators of inconsistency. We review what role the religions of African origin played in the social cohesion and racial solidarity of those rootless beings who preceded us. We try to explain, according to white western rationality, the love that the black nannies transferred to the children of their masters, who depriving them of the company of their own children, brutally eradicated their maternity. It is not attempted, of course, to transpose the past to the present, ignoring the influences of the socio-historical context in social intersubjectivity, but instead to study the features of the way of life and think of what as a people distinguishes us from the rest; to glimpse how much remains of the initial line, and under what influences the modifications in those tracks have been produced; what extensions those primitive traits have in our co-existence, and in what measure the sediments stirred by the flux of time are agitated at the root of the perceptions, judgments and behaviors of the Cubans of today. In the year 2000, the young psychologist Sandra Morales won a literary prize for novel writers with the essay The Negro and their Social Representation, in which she arrived at conclusions similar to those of the social scientists who studied the Cuban racial problem since the uncertain years of the Nineties. In the groups studied by Morales "...they display the pejorative traits that associate the black with inadequate social behavior. These go from anti-social conduct, such as delinquency, to manifestations contrary to the social norms of education, like being vulgar or rowdy. Meanwhile, everyone concurs that the blacks are of good character, through which they express their happiness and sociability. None of the researchers whom I consulted in recent years identifies the negative self-perceptions of black Cuban women and men with the internalization of feelings of shame, although various researchers appraise contradictory elements in the construction of their racial identity. The above becomes explicable, when a process of identity forging begins from the edges, where notions, representations, codes of communication, attitudes and behaviors, confront dominant cultural patrons and it then becomes impossible to avoid or ignore that they are ideal constructions, fed by the context in which the existence of persons unfolds. A consequence of that may be the distancing that in every era of our history, black persons and octoroons with a certain level of instruction and solvency have displayed with respect to their brothers of the popular masses, and the naturalness with which during the Colony these persons--when they could allow themselves--would exploit t the enslaved workforce. Africa was no stranger to the capture and possession of slaves before the Europeans made it into a degrading industry, at whose base operated tribal chiefs, tyrants and kinglets, as Lino Novás Calvo argues in the anti-slavery discussion in his novel Peter White the slaver. That inheritance and the symbolic positioning derived from the possession of slaves naturalized the situation among the wealthiest blacks and mulattos. The historian Rafael Duharte, in typifying the upper strata of "Habaneros" classified as not white in the first half of the 19th century, describes an individual who flaunted ownership "...of a tailor shop, a woodshop or a business with funeral pomp; owned various houses and slaves, which produced abundant rents, and was sublieutenant, sergeant or captain of the Batallion of Loyal Browns and Blacks, as well as being a relevant figure in the national guilds... With the suppression of the national cabildos, and the promulgation of a Law of Association, the Africans and their descendents stepped to a new type of sociability, that among the popular masses supported solidarity networks, maintained their re-elaboration of the African culture as reason and social mortar, as well as awarding an ever more important role to the construction of Cubanity and citizenship. Already in the 20th century, the descendents of Africans of greater solvency constituted the most select societies and clubs. Denying the African culture they had by inheritance, they adopted that absolutist and discriminatory myth called western culture and copied the lifestyle of the groups who held power, though their economic advance would be insufficient to close the social distance that separated the blacks and mulattos from the Caucasians. These "aristocratic" blacks and mulattos, whom the opera buffa mocked in a degrading form, yet just in historical terms, never turned their eyes back to Africa, did not dance to the rhythm of a drum nor performed "amazing" contortions behind a conga line at the carnival. Many fervently embraced the Catholic religion; they constructed schools, clinics and schools to which the poor blacks and mulattos did not have access; they joined in republican politics without rejecting patronage and the prevailing corruption; they lived oscillating between regret and shame; and politely demanded their rights, so fearful of "excess" that they preferred not to arrive. A testimony from the epoch takes note of a composition in verse which, learned from memory by black and mulatto persons in the Jesús María neighborhood, around the years of the Twenties of the past century, might be taken as a requirement for admission into the Fraternal Union Club: Listen black rumba guy, wearing a sash, do not alert the seven who would tan your hide. I beg and want you to put limits on the rumba and if you wish to vote don't dance conga, nor line, and go seeking another field decent and without commotion. Stop with the Santeria of Ogún and of Yamayá and throw Obatalá aside chief of the sorcerers. These people of color who like to dance the bamba with no shoes on their feet, emitting a foul odor, can take up the drum, the beads, the stewpot, snails, candle stubs, horn and bones of the dead, and into this brew pour oil and fire. Further, in regard to their superior elitism, it is fair to recognize that the black middle class played a positive role during the first third of the republican century, inasmuch as it offered an alternative image of the black Cuban that refuted the dominant negative stereotypes; they conquered and legitimated negotiating spaces with the organs of political and economic power; assumed the responsibility of representing their type from every class and stratum, and performed persistent promotion of the advantages of education and culture, encouraging the spirit of overcoming of those whom they took as positive referents. It cannot be easy to judge those persons from the social, cultural and political vantage that we have today. The paradox of the children and grandchildren of the enslaved who managed to constitute themselves as a middle class at the dawn of the 20th century can be explained with the words of the sociologist Ervin Goffman, who could supplement his conscientious study of the construction of negative identities starting with his life experiences as a Jew: Whether or not one maintains a strict alliance with their equals, the stigmatized individual can reveal an ambivalent identity, when he sees his counterparts nearby behaving in a stereotyped manner, and display in an extravagant or hurtful form the negative attributes imputed to him. These scenes can repel him, given that, after all, he supports the norms of the rest of society yet his social and psychological identification with the transgressors keeps him united with that which he rejects, transforming the revulsion into shame, and later the shame into something of which he feels ashamed. In synthesis: one can neither accept their group nor abandon it.. Culture, excellence in the exercise of some office, political positioning and, to a lesser degree, economic elevation, have been catalysts in the social ascent of black and mulatto persons over our republican history, including its socialist stage. A part of them, few in relation to the overall group, have come to hold positions of power, whether they be political, symbolic (deriving from professions of high notoriety or social recognition) or economic (generally as a return on the foregoing). Nevertheless, in some cases such a victory has a high psychological cost, because the ascent requires at times a certain estrangement from origins, an attitude of detachment with respect to those who are at the base of the social pyramid. Following this path, the exceptional black--imitator of Sab and of Francisco--adjusts to maintain silence and "not see" the disadvantage of origin of the majority of his equals; to observe an "unprejudiced and liberal" attitude in the face of socially degrading jokes, proverbs and practices; to accept her presumed rarity as a human type, thereby reaffirming the inferiority of the pertinent group; and to stay distant or display a hypercritical attitude towards delinquent persons or those observing marginal or violent conduct, forgetting the hist the orical and socio-cultural conditionings of such behavior. It follows that, under our conditions, the shame at negritude should have more profound roots in class consciousness than in the racial identity. The "super-fine Negros" are parodied with pain and irony by the hip-hop group Free Hole Negro, through the recreation of a joke which functions as a sort of jingle in the Cuban oral tradition: "All us fine blacks have decided not to go near the rumba." They perform it with irony because the cultural inheritance is not a package that can be jettisoned for pure convenience; to disengage from it turns out to be as difficult as removing one's skin. With pain, because self-dispossession entails the abandonment of the struggle and, together with their exceptionality, they accept certain rules of convenience, they validate racial hierarchies, they learn to use the protective armor of silence, they accede to social spaces of undeniable classist shading, and they manage to forget everything else..."because all manner of opposing and denouncing it are not going to change anything." The analysis of such processes of alienation with respect to one's family and personal history, of rupture with the cultural inheritance absorbed together with the mother's milk, permits understanding what happened to a mixed-race United States youth who, in the midst of the process of assuming his racial identity, received advice from one of the black countrymen of his white grandfather: They will prepare you to crave that which you do not need. They will prepare you to manipulate words in a way that makes them mean nothing. They will prepare you to forget what you already know. They will prepare you so well, that you will begin to believe what they tell you about equality and the American way of life and all that crap. They will give you a corner office, they will invite you to elegant dinners and will tell you that you are a credit to the race. And when the hour arrives when you want to begin to change things, then they will hit you with a yank of the chain and will tell you that you can be a well-prepared Negro and have a good salary, yet be a nigger in the final analysis. With time, that youth managed to enter into politics, applying that learned during his short period as a community activist and his experience as a lawyer. He was the fifth black man in the history of his nation who arrived at the position of senator and did not pause until being the first to access the Oval Office. Of course, we speak of Barack Obama, the youth who forgot the advice of old Frank. Afro-American literature archives some famous works, in which the hiding of the African inheritance or of the slave condition, as a strategy for social positioning, fails, becoming the imposter in drama. Such fictional narrative never existed in Cuba, not only because blacks, their history and their struggles may have been little approached through literature after the abolition of slavery; also because in our country impure origin never was an obstacle to social ascent if one had resources to obtain or simulate the condition of whites. Meanwhile, the conciliator argument ("Here one who has no conga, has carabali") as well as the questioner ("And your grandmother, where is she?") display a certain level of social acceptance of the African genetic inheritance or, at least, of the probability of its manifestation at the individual scale. Such that the shame at negritude emanates less from the skin than from the stereotypes that attribute anti-values and defects to persons of dark coloration; and the personal assimilation of the social stereotype that typifies conduct flowers in the emphatic negative of specific preferences: "I cannot play the conga drum nor any percussion instrument"; "I don't like carnivals"; "That neighborhood--almost always in reference to an unhealthy settlement--begins two blocks beyond my house." The racial writings on such cultural distancing legitimate expressions like "You had to be a Negro," a sentence that alludes to inadequate behaviors that the oral tradition attributes to the members of that racial group, leaving it free for everyone to define the qualities which are lacking in the person in question. Referring always to conduct or cultural practices considered in bad taste, that is, undoubtedly, a shaming judgment, employed to typify the offender, take distance from them, or to make them feel bad for manifesting certain characteristics of conduct. Some of the black persons whom I have interviewed in recent years complained, acerbically, that such expressions are employed as reprimands for people of such complexions. Yet I have noticed that not always the assertion, "You had to be a Negro" externalizes feelings of shame before the alien bad conduct. It will depend on the tone of voice and the facial expression what we understand as an appelation for good behavior: "Behave, do not confirm what you think of us," or else we observe the internalization of the stereotype: "It is a shame the way you behave; it is with reason that we say of the blacks that..." On the other face of the coin we find the sensation of pride among those who manage to surpass the obstacles, demonstrating that exceptional results in any area of human activity to not correlate to any genetic singularity, but instead to the exercise of vocation, will and perserverence. In Cuba, each black person whose image television or the newspapers reiterate in virtue of professional successes or other socially relevant behavior, becomes a symbol. The people stop them in the street, ask them about their work, the family, or comment on some recent apparition. Some smile while they make an accomplice's gesture or a flourish of open solidarity. It concerns, the majority of times, simple people, often advanced in years or near old age, who lived a past of opprobrium so the value of the persons appreciate much more than the price of things. In that smile with brilliant eyes one perceives a sort of compensation, a sensation of shared victory. Whoever pauses to converse or exchange greetings with these persons demonstrate a grandiose peace, like that which must have seized Moses on top of Mount Sinai. TRAIT NO.2 AN INFERIORITY COMPLEX Various investigations performed in Cuba on racialism reflect a certain sedimentation in the negative self-perceptions of black persons. Like any process that engenders and reconciles its own contradictions until those become insoluble, The racial identity of Cuban black persons is expressed in a dual vision that offers balance between positive and negative qualities, or locates such persons at one or another pole, according to the sign of the attributes conferred upon them. The breakup of the homogeneity in the representations of negative sign with black persons is the result of the slow erosion of prejudices of a classist nature associated as much with the social function as with the social position of the subjects. Hundreds of thousands of black and mixed-race persons have obtained technical or higher studies teaching certificates. Many practice socially recognized professions, despite the appreciable reduction in expectations for high professional qualification in the life projects of the youngest Cubans. Others have important responsibilities in the budgeted state sector (linked to social services) and, to a much lesser extent, in the business system. The rising social mobility of the black Cubans, slowed down today from more than 20 years of economic contingencies, cannot be explained solely starting from their high levels of schooling. Each Cuban female or male black who manages to situate themself in the narrowest part of the social pyramid--as an intellectual, artist, director, or of high standing; almost never as the successful empresario--does so through persistent personal efforts with relatives who often are not supported by institutional strategies that encourage the aspirations for political discourse. In the majority of cases, the family handholds have a spiritual character, that is, provide strength to overcome barriers and obstacles. To learn to advance over a path to the degree that you yourself are constructing it, was the strategy imparted to me by a recognized doctor, proud of what she had achieved despite being an orphan, of humble origin and born in a mountain village. The differences that popular judgment establishes between persons of a dark tinge, have to do also with the eagerness for knowledge and the importance which the majority of the socially better positioned blacks awards to their professional competence. They are people of distinction who sometimes "surprise" by presenting social behavior better than expected, that is, contravening the most extensive stereotypes. It suffices to remember the eulogistic description clinging to Claudio José Domingo Brindis de Salas (1853-1911), one of the three great Cuban musicians of the 19th century. It is known that the public as much as European criticism of the era exalted the musical talent and the interpretive force of the Italian genius Niccolo Paganini (1782-1840) to the point of making him the paradigm of chamber music. Olle Bornemann Bull (1810-1880) acquired renown as the "nordic Paganini," for his mastery of improvisation; the passionate Pablo Sarasate (1844-1908) was denominated the "Spanish Paganini"; and the virtuoso Jan Kubelík (1880-1940) was known as the "Czech Paganini." Our lovely musician, however, was identified as the "black Paganini"; and I do not believe that was so, only because Cuba was a small colonized island, lost on the map; probably a prejudiced view then considered Claudio José Domingo's condition of blackness more foreign to his musical excellence than his Cuban origin. The tendency for this double emphasis when one alludes to the proper development of dark-skinned persons has been maintained until today. For years, I have taken note of the expressions most used to positively value black persons at their centers for study, work, or in their neighborhoods: "Fine," "Educated" (in these cases the adjective is almost always preceded by the word black); "He is always reading"; "Her children are kept very clean"; "You never will hear a swear word"; "They are neither riffraff nor scandalized"; "How well he expresses himself"; "She is always well-arranged"; "They are very elegant"... Thus, the elegy converts the correct behavior to exceptional and, if it is refuted, the paternalistic recognition cements the denigrating representations which predominate, affirming the reference group and with that the centrality of the white, in keeping with the mythologies that confer a "universal" character only to the cultures emanated from societies which attained greatest scientific-technical development, by virtue of an early and not pious accumulation and internationalization of capital, achieved through the exploitation of enslaved persons. The results of one of the self-administered questionnaires that I had to apply to argue some thesis in Elogio de la altea seem to ratify the above arguments. In it the persons were asked to select five of the virtues that they most valued, among 20 qualities displayed alphabetically. Almost two thirds of the sample gave much importance to creativity and honesty, while portions between 30 and 50 percent of those interviewed highlighted, additionally, the spirit of overcoming, solidarity, professionalism, and perserverence. It was interesting to note that the selections of persons self-identified as whites coincided, in order of importance, with the two qualities most valued by the set of the sample; yet among the blacks and mixed-races honesty was displaced by the spirit of overcoming. The manifest desire for improvement--cultural, economic, social--of the darkest Cubans suggests comprehension that they are in a disadvantaged situation, the confirmation of braking mechanisms of an objective and subjective nature, and the will to vanquish obstacles. The relegation of solidarity to a primary quality (highlighted by a third of those of mixed race and by ten percent of the blacks consulted) points, more than to individualism as a social attitude, to a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of group solidarity, or to the recognition of the social fragility of the pertinent group. Various of the black and mixed-race professionals whom I interviewed see themselves as modern "cimarrons," people who have to fight for what they want, in hunt for the opportunities that the social medium, or the Orishas confer upon them. This mystical sense of life sustains as much the impetus of those who advance most socially, confident of their own strengths and under the protective mantle of the nuclear or religious family, as the apathy of those who do not try to discover and exploit their reserves, resigned to the supremacy of external powers. The reply to an open question, located at the end of the cited interview, ratified criteria glimpsed in in individual interviews although the techniques were applied to different persons. The codification and computation of the answers of blacks and those of mixed race reflects that almost a two-thirds segment restrict their confidence to their loved ones or to the magical- religious realm, with a pattern following the verbal conjugation "I trust..." where the phrases In my family, In my mother, In myself, In God, In the Orishas appear with the greatest frequency. The analysis of the responses offered by persons self-classified as whites, as well as greater diversity, illustrates a lower level of social recognition. More than half refer, in one way or another, their security in the social environment, in expressing confidence, to: the future, to human betterment, to wisdom, to friendship and love, in the education of their children, or in the family. Around 20 percent demonstrate skepticism, and confide in few things or in nothing, and only one in every six persons places their faith in God, in themselves or in their spouse. The assymmetry between the answers of the two racial groups considered reinforces the perception that black and mixed-race persons in Cuba do not value to the same degree as the whites, the beneficial capacity of relations, politics and social institutions. This attitude, which recent research into "barrios" of Havana attributes to neighborhoods marked by poverty, is not the result of an institutional racism that segregates or forgets persons due to the color of their skin; yet it confirms the evidence about the majority presence of black and mixed races in populational nucleii whose life conditions are very precarious. The feeling of abandonment is often compensated by mysticism, understood not as superstition, but instead as the absence of familiar memory that blurs the identity contours of a good part of the Afro-americans. The impossibility of constituting a personal memory that revisits the past and reviews the origins of the diasporic nationality stimulates self-awareness starting with collective memory, from a presumed origin--almost intuited--constructed from shreds of the lived experience. Mysticism endows the past with shared meaning, structures a type of historical memory where the psychic and affective elements have a determinate weight, and prefigure a permanent emotional connection with the ancestors. In this regard, the Afro-Colombian Silvia Regina de Lima Silva has written: If the process of subjectivization represents the recovery of history and not merely a personal story, it can be said that black subjectivity is manifested as a collective subjectivity... We discover ourselves as part of a world that is prior to we ourselves. But it is not a past world, it is a world that is part of our world, that is seen in our reality. We feel protected, sheltered, accompanied by the ancestors. For many Negros and Negresses this has produced a sense of pertinence and has been a common meeting place. The prevalence of negative social representations of the pertinent group exercises upon the black persons a psychological pressure of great significance. The most elementary response is the confirmation in conduct of stereotypes, in a logic that the Cuban researcher María del Carmen Caño summarizes with the words: "If you exclude me from the good, I stand out as bad." And indeed people, as defense mechanisms, can offer violence in exchange for rejection, above all if the society--the collective consciousness, the social stereotypes, the oral nature, public opinion--seems to say to the individual "Back off, such as you are, we shall not accept." It is known that, on a family scale, the modes and styles of life are reproduced as the simple effect of radiating, for they are the most influential milieu in the shaping of values, personal referents, self-representations, communicatory codes, and classification criteria; a favored environment, in turn, through its historical and social contexts. The family scope and the immediate social medium--the "barrio," the school, friends, cultural consumption that is personalized or shared--become prisms which refract, each in its own way, the spectrum of colors that reality constructs. To subvert their influence, to subtract from persons the net woven of rites, traditions and customs when these do not contribute to individual advancement, is not easy, even for those who strive to change their lives. The flattening effect that an inequitable and competitive social medium exercises upon personal aspirations is one of the triggering factors for individual or collective frustration that sustains, not infrequently, the showboating bravado conduct of women and men of any skin color, whom a denigrating glance designates as marginal and racial prejudice configures ideologically as blacks. Overall, the inter-racial tensions in Cuba have not escalated to a state of conflict, for we deal with a lightly hierarchized society in which the official anti-racist discourse, and democratic participation in the social spaces --communities and neighborhoods, schools, work and recreation centers, and diverse institutions--just like increased mixed-races, discourage the establishment of any type of racial phobia. Given that the white is not seen as a racial group but by the stereotypes and social representations that rank persons possessing that phenotype, the conflict is made visible in the relational and symbolic domains. Rigidities in the relations between whites and blacks in Cuba are evidenced, for example, in boss-subordinate tensions when the former has a dark color, or in collectives of specialists or processes where the darkest persons demonstrates professional competencies worthy of ascent; in inter-racial couples exposed to different levels of family rejection, and in the predominance of racial endogamy in the selection of the closest friendships. On the symbolic plane, the tensions are externalized, among others, in manifestations of frustration and non-conformity versus the ruling social representations, those that are fed by the pre-eminence of the white and their behavioral and aesthetic reference systems in the representation of beauty, wisdom and success. The reduction in the living standards of the mid-levels of the Cuban population occurred over the past quarter century, having had a greater impact among black persons, a group for whom the social ascent experienced between 1959 and 1990 slows in a notable fashion; while social labor reproduction not only returns to the family in a more linear form, but also many sons of diplomaed black professionals during the years of the Seventies and Eighties stall or indeed regress, and are returning to be mid-level technicians and skilled workers. In those black and mixed-race families where education was the primary wager for social advancement--no doubt the majority--the current disruptive and adverse situation can generate feelings of inferiority, apathy or conformity, as a reaction to the decline in opportunities for positive mobility, in a society where the progressive inequality and the incipient social-spatial segregation --the result of economic disparities, not of class or racial oppression--revive historic frustrations. The understand the historicity of the responses provided by the subordinate subjects, it will help us to note certain psychological springs in the conduct of Cuban persons who, notably worried about the influence that a dark color of their skin might have in their personal projects, are characterized by rebuff, ostentation, a spirit of competence, and the rejection of amorous relations with persons of similar physiognomy, once they manage --through the exercise of their profession, an "advantageous" marriage, the successful outcome of personal or family business, or activities of dubious legality--to achieve consumption levels that permit them to assume the lifestyle of the nouveau riche, that is, of the solvent colonized. There is a certain manner of rationalizing the inferiority complex that leads to Bovary-ism, a state of chronic dissatisfaction produced by the asymmetry between one's aspirations and personal goals, and the possibilities of attaining them, as happened with Gustave Flaubert's protagonist. So as not to negate themself, the person sets to demonstrating their superiority at every time and place, through competition or obsessive comparisons with other members of their social environment. It is a psychological disorder that has no age, color nor gender and whose aggravation is in direct relation with individual social vulnerability, advanced not through unrealizable amorous fantasies like those of Emma Bovary, but instead through the anguish resulting from the frustration of their life projects. The competitive attitude, one of the most developed and perturbing responses of persons to real or supposed social inferiorization, is located on one extreme of our imaginary scale and externalizes a particular inferiority complex that was typified a half century ago by the Martinique intellectual Frantz Fanon: "The blacks are comparison...at every moment will be preoccupied with self-valorization and the ideal of the I. Whenever they enter into contact with another the problem of value and merit surges in them. The Antilleans have no value in themselves, being always tributaries of the appearance of the Other." Such an attitude--that assumes justice as a goal, not as a means--generates tensions which sharpen in a form directly proportional to the demands of the challenge, and the same is offered in the economic, labor, cultural, or aesthetic areas. It codifies the stereotypes as an accusation; exploits one's physical, intellectual or spiritual reserves; compensates by a wild individualism the weakness or scarcity of webs of solidarity, whether they be social or family; it focuses on achieving its objectives minimizing the legitimacy of the means that are brought into play to attain them; and does not accept compromises. It obtains that dreamt for or perishes morally, suffering the others' successes, or transferring to third-parties the responsibility for the failure. The internalization of the competitive attitude brings active resources into play that include wardrobe, makeup, vocabulary, and image projection. The more sophisticated, refined or elitist is the scenario that the black or mestizo persons have to display socially--above all the women--the more attention is given to external attributes and more careful becomes the planning of conduct in public spaces. This is a universal response of people to stereotypes and social representations which denigrate them. A study performed by the researcher Julie Andrea Chaparro among black women in Bogotá reflects upon their professional activity: In this domain, images concerning their intellectual capacity continue being operative, for the reason that there are always persons waiting to make a discordant commentary or which "smears" them... To think twice or three times about interventions in public, to arrange oneself very carefully for meetings--as a way of projecting an image of seriousness and confidence amidst others--preparing the theme in advance, are some of the conscious actions that should be taken at the time of engaging in their working activities. The same author, when she analyzes the role of stereotypes in mixed social encounters with participation of persons of differing pigmentation, notes that on festive occasions the workmates hope that, spontaneously, these women will rise and dance. According to their outlook, to be "put in their place" the black person should make jokes, amuse the others and be expert in dance. In various individual interviews held in the period 2008-2009 with black and mixed-race women who perform as professionals, I obtained testimonies that confirm the emergence of similar expectations in their social environment. One of them, a professor of Philosophy in a university, laid out: I am of serious character, jovial if I am among friends and am confident; yet the jokes do not reach me... I learned to dance on scholarship, being very young, but I did not step with facility onto a dance floor, much less with strangers. On top of that, I am organized, meticulous and punctual, such that during my professional life I have been described as haughty, prideful, in short, as a "mistaken" black, who "believes things"... They do not say it to my face but think it and at times make labored jokes or make allusions regarding this. On the upper levels of our social-labor structure, the rejection of attitudes of re-affirmation among the darkest persons can reach somewhat further, above all if it concerns the so-called weaker sex. A black or mixed- race woman whose behavior departs too much from the stereotypes--because she confides more in her intellectual capacity than in her physical or sexual attractiveness; does not bargain for promotions, but instead waits for them in accordance with her results; and who cimarróns, that is, exhibits intellectual autonomy and the capacity to assume risks--can be the victim of several variants of work violence, in which indifference and underestimation, the initial phase of the most common discriminary replies, come to be substituted--if they become ineffective--by covert tactics of professional contention, campaigns to discredit, or more or less evident labor harrassment. That such things happen in the sight of the whole world in no way guarantees that the causes of the problem will become clarified or that justice will prevail, for discriminators and the discriminated tend to "naturalize" these sort of tensions, simulating incomprehension or ignorance of the motives that animate one part or another, until the chain, like almost always, breaks at the weakest link. Then the denigrated person is "put in their place--with greater facility if it concerns a woman--or decides to change work, hopeful of finding an environment where competency will be fair and the mechanisms of evaluation and promotion more transparent. The processes of negative apprehension of qualities socially appreciated as positive is seen among the most complex manifestations of racist thought, for it subscribes--as Teun A. Van Djik has explained--to an ideological framework which "...given the strategic nature of their attitudinal (ethnic) schemas they can interpret positive actions of the minority groups in a way that is consistent with negative opinions and, vice verse, to select, focus upon, magnify, and generalize acts perceived as negative." This distortion of judgment, when dealing with judging a subordinate, forms part of the contention strategies that members of the better positioned classes and groups develop. When the oppressed or inferiorized subject adopts the qualities or resources (patrimony, social relations, knowledge, skills, psychic dispositions) that other put into play to maintain the status quo, it subverts the basis of the relationship of domination. Thus the manner of disarming those weapons--or that it, the qualities and resources which sustain the hegemony of the few--will be to deny that the subordinate subject possesses them, or to assign negative signifiers to the use that is made of them. It is certain that the disqualification exerts its effect on the symbolic plane and does not strip the subordinate subject of the resources she requires for her emancipation; yet the procedure is sufficient to legitimate the subordinate condition of the person in question, ratifying them as worse, inferior or less valuable than the elements of the group that dominates. This type of recodification of the qualities and resources of the denigrated subject nourishes and re-affirms the social stereotype that stigmatizes them and legitimates the asymmetry of their relations with those who comprise the hegemonic sectors, making them more random and more difficult the achievement of their principal goals. From this perspective it can be understood why at times the good education, discretion and seriousness of the "fine blacks" is conflated with arrogance, or why among women little given to excesses of confidence or promiscuity, it is said in a derogatory tone--above all if black or mixed-race women--that "they believe things." Additional elements among the factors that inhibit people's social progression are suggested in the compilation of the answers to another item in the above mentioned questionnaire; formulated in a similar fashion and with an identical number of options, yet referring to the defects that most offended the respondents. The summary of the responses situated mediocrity, envy and cowardice at the head of the list, the first two with rejection equivalent to two thirds or more, and the third, to half of the persons interviewed. These responses allude more to the perturbations of the labor environment into which not a few professionals and technicians in our country are involved than to the manifestation of inter-racial relations in the workplace, and insinuate problems of a relational character that affect healthy work emulation and slow personal advancement. Although the high impact of feelings as unhealthy as envy, or of mediocrity--this spectrum that grows when intolerance reigns, according to Jorge Mañach--constitute serious threats to the development and application of talent in a meritocratic society like the Cuban, it this case it is well to highlight a difference of opinion in the group of those classified as non-white, given that the third of the qualities which unite the most adverse judgments--cowardice--was displaced by racism, in similar proportions, if compared with the black and mixed-race respondents (90 and 70 percent respectively). When accumulated frustration propels the vital projects of persons, they live every day as if yanked into an interminable race, a course of obstacles --real or imagined--which should be won one way or another. What is most worrying in the competitive attitude is that it is rarely admitted by those who assume it; it becomes unhealthy and, over time, can acquire neurotic tones, given that the superstructure of themes and threats of the social medium introduce in persons an emotional tension of a permanent character. Then, the responsibility for the failures is charged to the others' malevolence and envy and they proceed through life with the stealth of a samurai, the gaze attentive to the slightest change in the situation, the hand resting on the sword handle or wielding a spear. I have seen several talents spoiled, corroded by this permanent vigil. However, retreat and self-marginalization worry me more, attitudes easily perceptible in persons of every color belonging to the most humble strata of our society. It is conduct that some consider of no danger--as if in a society that claims to be socialist the greatest threat were not demobilization--but which affects the fulfillment of life projects and, above all, its quality. It becomes the vital philosophy of people incapable of dreaming, of desiring, of daring, who live difficult lives, sheltered in impregnable resignation. Adversity comes to persuade them that past and present calamities render useless the struggle for the future. TRAIT NO.3 "UNCLE TOM-ISM" A very widespread anecdote about the impact of the famous novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe upon the United States abolitionist movement alludes to an encounter by her with Abraham Lincoln, during the turbulent years of the War of Secession. She records that in the preliminaries of the interview with the president, smiling, he observed by way of welcome: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!" Avatars of the black Tom, who did not forsake his meekness and humility nor abdicated his unmoveable Christian faith despite the humiliations and mistreatment suffered at the hands of different owners, had great resonance in the states of the Union after 1851, when the abolitionist newspaper The National Era began to publish the story in the form of a soap opera. After March of 1852, when it appeared for the first time as a book, Uncle Tom's Cabin became a sort of anti-slavery bible for the growing masses of citizens who questioned the savage mode of production established in the south. However, the widest, most diverse and convincing campaign against slavery in that country was brought about by the victims themselves, in meetings and gatherings of the abolitionist movement, as oral narrators or as writers, to the extent that some of the escapees and freed servants amplified their idiomatic arsenal. Inspired by The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African,--a text published in London in 1789--the anti-slavery conscience in the states to the north contributed, among other titles: A Narrative of Moses Roper: adventures and escape from American slavery (1837), The Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847) and The Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853), which sold thousands of copies between 1820 and 1860, some translated into other languages. The social origin and skin color of Mrs. Stowe, on one side, and the gentle long-suffering mood of her protagonical character, on the other, converted Uncle Tom's Cabin into a world bestseller, with translations into more than 30 languages and countless copies distributed from one side of the globe to the other. Already in the 20th century, its author deceased and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) constituted, the work began to earn criticism for its message of passivity and Christian resignation in the face of classist and racial oppression, to the point of creating terms of a pejorative nature (Uncle Tom, uncle Tom-ism) much used by the anti- System rebels of the Sixties years, above all the black Muslims and the black Panthers. Regarding this book, Angela Davis, the United States fighter for civil rights, opines that: Uncle Tom's Cabin is full of assumptions about the inferiority of the feminine as well as of the black. The majority of black persons are docile and are bound to the domestic sphere whereas the majority of the women are mothers and little more. Despite how ironic it may seem, the most popular of the anti-slavery literature of the era perpetuated the racist ideas that justified slavery and the sexist notions which justified the exclusion of women from the political arena where the battle against her would be fought. Uncle Tom-ism is nothing more than the naturalization of the inferiority complex, the conscious and everyday negation of the derision suffered and the over-valuation of the crumbs that the oppressor ostentatiously throws onto the banquet table for the participation of the servants in the feast, although it is pertinent to note that an inferiority complex is always induced, in the first place, by the asymmetry of resources which persons utilize to position themselves in society. Into this field enters the Cuban intellectual Esteban Morales, whose historical analysis of relations of domination describes the experience that, in the exercise of power, white-skinned persons display, which of course does not have a genetic, but an historical, explanation. The reasons for the social pre-eminence of the lightest persons connects with the economic capital and the cultural capital that they use to satisfy their interests; with the social capital that they put in play in order to attain their goals; and with the psychological fortitude with which they are endowed to subordinate others or have an effect upon their forms of thinking and behaving. Social practice confirms that feelings of inferiority are not generated when one has the resources for the exercise of power, those which are developed over generations of subjects bound by links of parentage, affinity or business, and later transferred to their descendents. Heirs to resources whose accumulation and use always turns out to be asymmetric, the persons embodying this legacy will have a starting advantage to maintain or better their social standing. An inferiority complex is reinforced by economic relations that reserve for the poorest--many of them also the darkest--the servile condition, the worst and lowest paid positions, or the least socially appreciated tasks; they are segregated into the least urbanized and comfortable "barrios" and barriers are imposed on access to the political and social resources. The cultural discourse stigmatizes them: it scientifically argues their inferiority and samples from history to exemplify it, carefully selecting failures and defeats; it takes note of physical attributes and cultural particularities to turn them into symbols for subordination and lack of success; and it creates fictions, songs and games where this human archetype--the black, the indigenous, the poor, the illiterate--is mocked, humiliated or vanquished. Finally, the social milieu converts the myth into a natural law and the habit into truth; it pacifies the relations of domination and naturalizes, through innumerable everyday routines, the bitter realities of every day. The internalization of the supposed inferiority of the dominated is a condition for power to be exercised upon her without disruptions nor conscious resistance. Due to which--says Fernando Ortiz--"...this negative phenomenon, truly psychiatric in its collective pathology, is not privy to the blacks and we constantly see it in individuals and peoples of the most diverse races, it being, undoubtedly, the most serious obstacle to the dignity and social ascent of the contingent races to the upper levels of non-discrimination. In Cuba, the anti-slavery bourgeois paternalism of the 19th century recognized the right of the blacks to emancipation, but only if the redemptive labor was under the control of their white compatriots and if the former remained eternally grateful. This vision of the other's rights--affirmed in the correspondence and the writings of Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, Manuel Sanguily and Calixto Garcia, among some great names of our past liberation-- provided much utility to the affluent classes in the bourgeois neo-colonial republic, above all for the exercise of politics. Paternalism kept the blacks and mulattos of greatest social relevance tied to the machinery of the parties, and offered resistance to the initiatives that would put the relations of domination in danger, with the argument that others of the enslaved had no capacity for governing nor administration without the tutelage of the enlightened whites. In this regard, I have a collation of the libel published by the lawyer Gustavo Enrique Mustelier, a functionary in the government of José Miguel Gómez, with the irregular and explicit intention of eliciting displays of social commiseration during the fateful summer of 1912. This is not for its aesthetic or literary values, but instead for its capacity to reflect the mentality of that period. Although the blacks and mestizos won fighting with weapons in hand --and often even without them--the right to participate, proportionally, in the public administration, the parties and organs of political power, the army, the police, and the productive and service establishments, the only way for their voice to be heard and benefit, on an equal basis with the white population, from the wealth produced by the nation, this descendent of slavers, in his prophetic argument concerning the extinction of the black in Cuba and the turn of a century, wrote: "...in none of the orders of human activity does Cuba owe to the black race an element of positive advancement. Nevertheless, we whites have ceded participation in the most enviable positions in public life to the black, not by license of ability and preparation, but instead by the concept of representing that race with whose existence we share." The fight for proportional represenation has a long tradition in the partisan struggles, the action of the unions, the student protests, the feminist demands and, in general, all the movements for civil rights articulated since the French Revolution up to our time. This seems legitimate and necessary, yet must be considered as a means, never as an end, for the minority participation does nothing but provide some evidence: to be represented is an essential condition to open access routes to the organs of power--political, cultural or symbolic--and to the negotiation scenarios and distributive mechanisms of the social politics in play. Furthermore, to be proposed as a theme is to be made visible, nothing more, entailing a reformist posture that often ends in political abdication, uncle Tom-ism which has infiltrated the state administration, whether it be in the figure of the "canchanchán," the venal functionary, or the obedient employee who does not question erroneous decisions nor dares to identify herself denouncing some bad act. The exercise of uncle Tom-ism in today's Cuba cannot seek compensation for the disadvantages associated with material precariousness, skin color, low levels of schooling, or social vulnerability. Converted at times into an accomodationist tactic, it serves a placid and inefficient bureaucracy, channels corruption, and places a disguise of discipline on a sort of submission that confronts the ethics enthroned by the revolution. Uncle Tom-ism, an an attitude towards life, is a crime of moral lesion. Taking advantage of precepts and politics in an opportunistic manner, uncle Tom-ism can re-install itself in political practice, if its pretext is the social equity proclaimed by the revolutionary ideal to comprise the compensatory effect of the representation provided in the spaces of political, economic, cultural, and symbolic power. If the agreements of partisan agreements about the representation of youth, women, blacks, and those of mixed race in the directive organs of the Party and the State are badly understood; if the access routes to the most luminous sectors of the social-labor spectrum are not made transparent and monetized; if there is exposition of our multiple origins in cultural and aesthetic references that claim to be hegemonic, there will be parcels of power and influence where the "racial condition" is put above professional competency. And the mix of bad reasoning with good intentions will eventually confirm, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the historically constructed stereotypes constructed upon the inferiority of those considered not white. There still is formalism in the application of the political truths promoted by the revolutionary Cuban government, as well as attitudes and conducts which, impudently invoking the revolutionary ethic, proceed in opposition to their precepts. There are directives more concerned to show balanced racial statistics than with the effectiveness of an inclusive and transparent politics; more determined that blacks and the mixed race figure in candidacies than in creating the conditions so that these persons can ascend, by virtue of their own merits, in the social-labor structures of important entities and sectors of the nation. To make a revolution and maintain it, before disappointed dreams and imperial threats, does not make us immune to a tradition of exercising power which, in democratic-bourgeois regimes, tends to use the representatives of minorities as legitimating alibis in a system where the class, gender, cultural, and racial hierarchies remain in full force. The deficient interpretation or application that can be made of inclusive politics that guarantee representation do not justify placing in doubt the capacity of black and mixed race persons to develop in a socio-political system ruled by a meritocracy. At times I have heard, with pain and disenchantment, criteria from white compatriots convinced that blacks and mestizos do not accumulate merit, but instead parameters. And this is publicly mentioned as a joke, often without someone refuting, on principle, the racist argument: "Since so-and-so will not be there, unless she meets all the parameters..." When today, for whatever reason, a black person of questionable behavior is emphatically reproached for their ingratitude towards the revolution--as if all Cubans of all colors have not been the object of the same benefits--when reasoning is anchored in unavoidable gratefulness and not in the ethics of compromise, the racist-paternalist patronage of the unhappy black to whom a distinguished white patriot has conferred liberty as a gift, something that in former times not a few thought and some wrote, not recognizing the decisive presence of the blacks and those of mixed race among the troops and the meaning of a popular army whose bravery made inevitable the leap from colony to republic, with all the shortcomings of that which we founded in 1902. TRAIT NO.4 SOCIALIZED AMBIVALENCE![]()